METHOD FOR GENERATING A RANDOM NUMBER ON A QUANTUM-MECHANICS BASIS AND RANDOM GENERATOR

摘要

The invention relates to a method for generating a random number on a quantum-mechanics basis and a random generator used notably for carrying out said method. The invention is based on the fundamentally random choice of path of a quantum particle on a beam splitter (8, 18), detectors (D1, D1', D2, D2') for capturing the particles being assigned to the outputs (11, 12, 16, 17) of the beam splitter (8, 18). The detectors or their counting events represent different number values of the random sequence. According to the invention, the generation of a multi-particle state in the output channel (11, 12, 16, 17) of the beam splitter (8, 18), and thus of several particles which impact on the detector (D1, D1', D2, D2'), significantly and advantageously increases the response probability of the detector and thus the probability of obtaining a useable counting event for every multi-particle state generated by the source (3, 3'). In this way a random sequence can be obtained more rapidly and more reliably than with single-particle detection.