A RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR BASED ON THE SPONTANEOUS .ALPHA.-DECAY

摘要

The present invention is an apparatus and a method for generation of random numbers. The apparatus (10) have an alpha-radiation source (12), such as Am 241, for which the decay product produces no secondary radiation with the energy equal or higher than that of the prime alpha radiation. The alpha particles emitted by the isotope and having reached the detector (14) have a narrow energy spectrum and, hence, produce identical electrical pulses in a detector. An alpha-particle detection system is provided which includes a differential discriminator (26) and a logical selector (24) for positively identifying individual events of alpha-decay in the alpha-radiation source a nd filtering out any other signals produced by different radiation sources both inside and outside the apparatus. An electronic unit processes the stream of identical electric pulses into a stream of random numbers completely free of correlations usually present in the output of other physical sources of rand om numbers.