Random number generation based on polarization mode noise of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

We propose an implementation of random number generation based on the measurement of polarization mode noise in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL). By measuring the phase difference between two laser beams with perpendicular polarization directions, a 40 Gbps generation speed is achieved with a simple post-processing method. The random sequence we generated passes both the standard statistical test suites (Diehard and NIST-STS) and 3 sigma criterion. Our setup is compact and easy for implementation, and it also has a better efficiency in extracting randomness from VCSEL compared with existing methods. (C) 2012 by Astro, Ltd.