面向全光物理随机数发生器的混沌实时光采样研究

基于混沌激光实现全光物理随机数发生器的物理基础是完成对混沌光信号的高速实时全光采样. 本文利用偏振无关的SOA构建出TOAD全光采样门, 以光反馈半导体激光器产生混沌激光, 对混沌激光的全光采样可行性进行了原理性实验论证, 实现了对光反馈半导体激光器产生的6.4 GHz带宽的混沌激光5 GSa/s的实时、高保真全光采样. 进一步研究显示, 光采样周期与外腔反馈时间成比例与否对混沌信号弱周期性的抑制水平影响显著. 当两者不成比例时, 可有效消除原始混沌信号的弱周期性, 有利于高质量物理随机数的产生.

Study on real-time optical sampling of chaotic laser for all-optical physical random number generator

Absolutely secure communication should be implemented only through the ‘one-time pad' proposed by Shannon, requires that physical random numbers with rates matched with the associated communication systems be used as secret keys. With the wide application of the WDM technology in optical communication, the single channel rate of the current digital communication system has exceeded 10 Gb/s and developed towards 100 Gb/s. To ensure the absolute security of such a large capacity communication, a large number of real-time, and secure random numbers are needed.#br#Secure random numbers are commonly produced through utilizing physical random phenomena, called physical random number generators. However, conventional physical random number generators are limited by the low bandwidth of the applied entropy sources such as thermal noise, photon-counting and chaotic electrical circuits, and thus have typical low bit rates of the order of Mb/s.#br#In recent years, chaotic lasers attracted wide attention due to their generation of secure, reliable and high-speed random number sequences, and so due to their coherent merits such as high bandwidth, large amplitude fluctuation and ease of integration. There have been lots of schemes based on laser chaos for high-speed random number generation, but most of them execute the random number extractions from the associated laser chaos in the electrical domain and thus their generation rates are faced with the well-known ‘electrical bottleneck'. On the other hand, all-optical random number generation (AO-RNG) methods are all signal processes in the optical domain, so they can efficiently overcome this rate limitation and have a great potential in generating ultrafast random numbers of several dozens or hundreds of Gb/s. However, there is no experimental report on its realization of AO-RNG. One of the obstacles in the way for the AO-RNG achievement is to implement the fast and real-time all-optical sampling of the entropy signals (i.e., laser chaos).#br#In this paper, we present a principal experimental demonstration of the feasibility in the all-optical sampling of the chaotic light signal through constructing a TOAD-based all-optical sampler with a polarization-independent semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). Specifically, we experimentally generate chaotic laser signals using an optical feedback semiconductor laser and finally complete a 5 GSa/s real-time and high-fidelity all-optical sampling of the chaotic laser with a bandwidth of 6.4 GHz. Further experimental results show that whether the optical sampling period is proportional to the external cavity feedback time or not has a great effect on the weak periodic suppression of the chaotic signal: only when both of them are out of proportion, can the weak periodicity of the original chaotic signal be effectively eliminated; and this is favorable for the generation of high-quality physical random numbers. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to realize all-optical sampling of chaotic signal in experiments.