Physical white chaos generation

Abstract

Physical chaos is a fascinating prospect for high-speed data security by serving as a masking carrier or a key source, but suffers from a colored spectrum that divulges system's intrinsic oscillations and degrades randomness. Here, we demonstrate that physical chaos with a white spectrum can be achieved by the optical heterodyning of two delayed-feedback lasers. A white chaotic spectrum with 1-dB fluctuation in a band of 11 GHz is experimentally obtained. The white chaos also has a perfect delta-like autocorrelation function and a high dimensionality of greater than 10, which makes chaos reconstruction extremely difficult and thus improves security.