[Cryptography] Photon beam splitters for "true" random number generation ?

[Ben Laurie]

On Sun, 13 Dec 2015 at 04:31 Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:

> I'm not a physicist, but I recall from my undergraduate days that one can
> produce a beam of essentially "pure" linearly polarized light.
> Furthermore, if one then splits this linearly polarized beam into two and
> passes one through another linear polarizer at 45 degrees and the other
> beam goes through a different linear polarizer also at 45 degrees to the
> first beam, but 90 degrees to the other polarizer, then each photon that
> gets through at all, must *randomly choose* whether it will align with the
> first polarizer or the second polarizer.
>
> We then *detect* these photons by positioning a detector behind the first
> polarizer and another detector behind the second polarizer.  We call the
> first detector the "0" detector and the second detector the "1" detector.
>

As soon as you do that, the quantum effects disappear so you're now relying
on the perfection of your beam splitter. You haven't said how that works,
though.
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