Gambling with superconducting fluctuations

Abstract

Superconducting nanowires and Josephson junctions, when biased close to superconducting critical current, can switch to a non-zero voltage state by thermal or quantum fluctuations. The process is understood as an escape of a Brownian particle from a metastable state. Since this effect is fully stochastic, we propose to use it for generating random numbers. We present protocol for obtaining random numbers and test the experimentally harvested data for their fidelity.