Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:
The outcome of quantum experiments is intrinsically unpredictable. Now physicists have combined that feature with blockchain techniques to generate random numbers in a fully transparent process for the first time1.
Public sources of random numbers are used for various applications, such as lotteries, jury-duty selection and the assignment of placebos in clinical trials. A process that not only produces numbers that are truly random, but also does so in a trackable, verifiable way, can add an extra layer of trustworthiness, say the researchers who developed the new system.
Their approach builds on a quantum-physics-based technique for generating random numbers that was first demonstrated in 2018 by physicists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. It uses a device that produces pairs of photons that are entangled with each other, meaning that they share a common quantum state. The photons in each pair are sent to two measuring stations around 100 metres apart, where their polarizations are detected to produce a string of digital bits (0s and 1s).
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