Unambiguous randomness from a quantum state
Summarize this article with:
Quantum Physics arXiv:2601.16343 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 22 Jan 2026] Title:Unambiguous randomness from a quantum state Authors:Fionnuala Curran View a PDF of the paper titled Unambiguous randomness from a quantum state, by Fionnuala Curran View PDF Abstract:Intrinsic randomness is generated when a quantum state is measured in any basis in which it is not diagonal. In an adversarial scenario, we quantify this randomness by the probability that a correlated eavesdropper could correctly guess the measurement outcomes. What if the eavesdropper is never wrong, but can sometimes return an inconclusive outcome? Inspired by analogous concepts in quantum state discrimination, we introduce the unambiguous randomness of a quantum state and measurement, and, relaxing the assumption of perfect accuracy, randomness with a fixed rate of inconclusive outcomes. We solve these problems for any state and projective measurement in dimension two, as well as for an isotropically noisy state measured in an unbiased basis of any dimension. In the latter case, we find that, given a fixed amount of total noise, an eavesdropper correlated only to the noisy state is always outperformed by an eavesdropper with joint correlations to both a noisy state and a noisy measurement. In fact, we identify a critical error parameter beyond which the joint eavesdropper achieves perfect guessing probability, ruling out any possibility of private randomness. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2601.16343 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2601.16343v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.16343 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Fionnuala Curran [view email] [v1] Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:57:54 UTC (42 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Unambiguous randomness from a quantum state, by Fionnuala CurranView PDFTeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-01 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)