Harvesting entropy and quantifying the transition from noise to chaos in a photon-counting feedback loop
Abstract
The unpredictability of physical systems can depend on the scale at which they are observed. For example, single photons incident on a detector arrive at random times, but slow intensity variations can be observed by counting many photons over large time windows. We describe an experiment in which we modulate a weak optical signal using feedback from a single-photon detector. We quantitatively demonstrate a transition from single-photon shot noise to deterministic chaos. Furthermore, we show that measurements of the entropy rate of a system with small-scale noise and large-scale deterministic fluctuations can resolve both behaviors. We describe how quantifying entropy production can be used to evaluate physical random number generators.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jul 14, 2015
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1506600112
Entities
People
- Aaron Morgan Hagerstrom
- Rajarshi Roy
- Thomas Edward Murphy
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- University of Maryland