Photonic Ternary Quantum Number Generators

Abstract

We construct a class of 3-dimensional photonic quantum random number generators and prove that each generates maximally unpredictable digits via measurements that are robust to errors. In particular, every sequence generated is strongly incomputable; hence its quality is provable better than that of every pseudo-random sequence. We also briefly contrast 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional quantum random number generators, discuss photonic implementations and show the superiority of the latter ones. These results suggest that incomputability in physics is real and practically useful.