Cosmic muon arrival directions as a source of entropy

Abstract

We demonstrate, for the first time, that the arrival directions of cosmic-ray muons from a muon telescope provide a measurable source of physical entropy. Using six months of data collected from a muon telescope, the local zenith and azimuth angles were used for randomness extraction. The result of this study show that each cosmic muon track from our detector can generate upto 4 bits with an entropy of 0.999182 bits/bit with a maximum bit rate of roughly 650 bits/s which can possibly be enhanced by improving the detector size and angular resolution. The suggested technique can be potentially used as a random number generator required for closing the settings-independence loophole in the tests for violations of Bell's inequality. The data acquisition, data reduction, and conditioning algorithms are discussed in detail.