February 25, 2021 at 2:00 pm
By normal standards, the design for a new laser is a total dud. Rather than producing a crisp, steady beam, the laser casts a fuzzy patch of light full of randomly flickering speckles of brightness. But to a team of physicists, the laser’s messy output is its greatest asset. The chaotic fluctuations in the laser’s light can be translated into 254 trillion random digits per second more than 100 times faster than other laser-powered random number generators, researchers report in the Feb. 26
Science.
“This is a marvelous step” toward more efficient random number generation, says Rajarshi Roy, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved in the work.