Randomness in post-selected events

Abstract

Bell inequality violations can be used to certify private randomness for use in cryptographic applications. In photonic Bell experiments, a large amount of the data that is generated comes from no-detection events and presumably contains little randomness. This raises the question as to whether randomness can be extracted only from the smaller post-selected subset corresponding to proper detection events, instead of from the entire set of data. This could in principle be feasible without opening an analogue of the detection loophole as long as the min-entropy of the post-selected data is evaluated by taking all the information into account, including no-detection events. The possibility of extracting randomness from a short string has a practical advantage, because it reduces the computational time of the extraction. Here, we investigate the above idea in a simple scenario, where the devices and the adversary behave according to i.i.d. strategies. We show that indeed almost all the randomness is present in the pair of outcomes for which at least one detection happened. We further show that in some cases applying a pre-processing on the data can capture features that an analysis based on global frequencies only misses, thus resulting in the certification of more randomness. We then briefly consider non-i.i.d strategies and provide an explicit example of such a strategy that is more powerful than any i.i.d. one even in the asymptotic limit of infinitely many measurement rounds, something that was not reported before in the context of Bell inequalities. © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.