How HotBits Works

Tunnelling to Freedom
Face it, folks: Nature is a lazy Mother. If there's any way at all a physical system:
subatomic particle, nucleus, atom, molecule, star, or galaxy can reduce its energy
without violating a law of physics, quantum mechanics tells us it will. What it doesn't
tell us is when. Why is this, and how can we exploit this physical principle to generate
random numbers?

Nuclear Decay the Beta Way

Consider the atoms of Cæsium-137 that make up the HotBits radiation source. Due to
details of how the atomic nucleus is structured which we thankfully don't need to get
into here, it turns out that if one of the neutrons in the nucleus were to turn into a
proton, the resulting Barium-137 nucleus would have less binding energy. Now a
neutron just can't turn into a proton willy-nilly: that would violate the law of charge
conservation since a neutron with a charge of 0 would be changing into a proton with
a charge of +1. Physicists believe charge conservation is never violated: even a black
hole bears the net charge of all the particles it has devoured. But there's a way around
this—if the neutron changes into a proton and simultaneously spits out an electron,
the charge before and after is the same; before we had a neutron with a charge of 0,
afterward a proton with a charge of +1 and an electron with a charge of −1.
+1 + −1 = 0: the books balance! In the world of atomic physics, this is called beta
decay and the electron that flies out of the nucleus a beta particle.

(A beta particle is an electron, pure and simple, and all electrons are absolutely
identical. The reason an electron which happens to begin its career by being shot out
of an atomic nucleus as opposed to, say, boiled out of the hot metal filament in the
other end of your computer monitor, is called a “beta particle” is historical. It took a
while for physicists to figure out that “beta rays” and electrons were one and the same
thing, and by that time the name had stuck.)

Anyway, we can write the formula for the beta decay of Cæsium-137 as:

The Cæsium-137 nucleus (the 137 means there is a total of 137 protons and neutrons
in the atom) spontaneously turns into a metastable nucleus of the element Barium
which still has a sum of 137 protons and neutrons, and a beta particle (electron) flies
out, resulting in no net difference in charge. Shortly thereafter (the half-life is just 156
seconds), the excited Barium nucleus emits a gamma ray and becomes the stable
ground state of Barium-137. “Gamma rays” turn out to be nothing other than photons
—particles of light, just carrying a lot more energy than visible light. They're called
“gamma rays” instead of “photons” for same reason beta particles aren't just called
electrons. Nuclear reactions release a lot of energy: photons of visible light have an
energy between 1 and 10 electron volts. The electrons in your computer monitor or

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
television have energies between 10,000 and 20,000 electron volts (the high voltage
needed to impart this energy to them is why it's a poor idea to stick your hand inside a
television set). By comparison, the photon that flies out of the decaying Barium-137m
nucleus has 661,660 electron volts (662 keV) of energy, and the electron from
Cesium-137 has a maximum energy of 1,176,000 electron volts (1.176 MeV). (Beta
decay of a neutron into a proton emits both an electron and an electron antineutrino,
which together carry away the total energy of 1.176 MeV; the antineutrino passes
through the detector (and for that matter, the entire Earth) without any interaction, so
the energy of the electron, which is detected, varies depending upon what fraction of
the total energy it happens to carry.) Particles with this kind of energy behave
differently than the kind we usually encounter, which is why it took a while for
physicists to figure out they really were just very energetic photons and electrons.
This also explains why “nuclear radiation” is more dangerous than daylight and why
nuclear bombs make so big a bang compared to the same amount of dynamite.

First Uncertainty Bank: Energy Loans for Needy Nuclei

Now you'd think that given the chance to reduce its energy by more than a million
electron volts, a Cæsium-137 nucleus would be just itching to heave that electron out
the door. But there's a catch. Even though the final result of emitting the electron
reduces the energy of the nucleus, the process of emitting it requires more energy than
the nucleus has lying around. Think of the poor Cæsium nucleus as being trapped on
a hillside like this:

If it manages somehow to get the energy to make it over the little bump to the right, it
can slide all the way down to the bottom and turn into Barium, but otherwise it's stuck
where it is. If quantum mechanics did not govern the universe, the Cæsium-137
nucleus would be stable. But, of course, without quantum mechanics atoms wouldn't
be stable, so neither you nor I nor anything else made of atoms would exist, so despite
all its complexity, fuzziness, uncertainty, and spooky action-at-a-distance, quantum
mechanics is probably a Good Thing. However, I must note that quantum mechanics
also permits Microsoft Windows to exist.

What our Cæsium atom stuck on its energy ledge needs is a loan of energy to escape.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
Once over the hill, it will gladly repay its debt with the ample energy it releases as it
skids down the slope into the valley of Barium. We could loan the energy to the
nucleus by hitting it with a gamma ray, but thanks to the uncertainty principle of
Heisenberg, that isn't necessary! The nucleus can, in effect, borrow the energy from
the vacuum, momentarily violating the law of conservation of energy, and then, from
the energy released by the decay, repay the loan before the conservation cops arrive.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle provides, described in very broad brushstrokes to

avoid getting bogged down in detail, that while any given physical quantity: the
position of a particle for example, can be measured as precisely as you wish, the more
uncertain a complementary quantity, momentum in the case of position, becomes. The
same uncertainty relation applies to time and energy. You can measure the energy of a
system as precisely as you like, but there is a minimum time required to measure its
energy to a given precision. Conversely, the energy of a system can be said to
fluctuate to an increasing extent as you observe it over shorter and shorter intervals.

On the scale of atoms and subatomic particles, the results of this uncertainty have
profound effects. For the uncertainty of energy at very short time intervals means
there is a nonzero probability that, at a given instant, the Cæsium-137 nucleus will
have enough energy to surmount the hill that is confining it. Once pushed over the
edge, the energy released pays back the uncertainty principle's “energy loan” in a time
less than would be required to measure the momentary non-conservation of energy.
One can also view the confined Cæsium nucleus as “tunnelling through” the barrier
confining it—in fact, this process is called “quantum tunnelling”.

But even though the energy loan which triggers a beta decay is not detectable, the
decay that results most definitely is and, being impossible in the absence of the
uncertainty principle, demonstrates its essential role in nuclear and atomic physics.
Note that once the Cæsium nucleus beta decays into Barium-137, it finds itself at the
bottom of a valley with steep walls on either side. There is no place to tunnel to—it is
trapped since the energy it would need to jump back up to the Cæsium-137 level
could be “borrowed” only for an interval less than the time needed to transform a
proton into a neutron. As a consequence, Barium-137 is a stable isotope—it is not
radioactive. We could, however, give it the energy required to jump it back onto the
Cæsium-137 ledge. By bombarding it with energetic electrons (beta particles) in a
particle accelerator or nuclear reactor, occasionally an electron will strike a Barium
nucleus with sufficient energy to convert a proton into a neutron—reversing the arrow
in the beta decay equation, transforming it back into Cæsium-137 through the process
of inverse beta decay. Once transformed, it is, of course, doomed to eventually tunnel
its way back to the bottom of the valley.

Physicists: please excuse my glossing over details such as the weak interaction, W bosons,
u and d quarks, cross sections, etc. etc. and the very sloppy description of the uncertainty
principle. I'm afraid if I go into any more detail, I'll lose the entire audience before we get
to the good stuff—half life and the no-hidden-variables nature of quantum theory.

Get a (Half-)Life
Barium is stable because the energy valley that contains it is so deep it can't borrow
the energy needed to tunnel out for long enough to complete the process. The barrier
confining Cæsium-137 is sufficiently high that a given nucleus has only a 50%

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
chance of tunnelling through in a period of 30.17 years—eternity on the time scale of
most nuclear events. This is called its half-life, since if you start out with a given large
number of Cæsium-137 nuclei, every 30.17 years you'll find that, on the average, half
of the number present at the start of the period have decayed into Barium. What
happens if the barrier is higher or lower, as is the case for other nuclei prone to beta
decay? Well, if the barrier is lower, it means less energy needs to be borrowed to
surmount it, and as a result the energy can be borrowed for a longer multiple of the
time needed to “do the deal”. As a result, the probability of the nucleus decaying in a
given period of time is increased or, in other words, the half-life is decreased. The
nucleus with a lower barrier will be more radioactive. Sodium-35 perches
precariously on a ledge with a tiny barrier compared to the one that confines
Cæsium-137. As a result, its half-life is only 1.5 milliseconds—one and a half
thousandths of a second. On the other hand, Indium-115 has an energy barrier so high
that you have to wait 4.4×1014: 440 million million years for half the nuclei in a
sample to decay. It kind of takes your breath away to discover a mundane physical
process which occurs at rates varying over 24 orders of magnitude—from about a
thousand times a second to a thousand times the age of the universe, but many things
about quantum mechanics take your breath away once you invest the effort to
appreciate (if not understand) them.

What's interesting, and ultimately useful in our quest for random numbers, is that
even though we're absolutely certain that if we start out with, say, 100 million atoms
of Cæsium-137, 30.17 years later we'll have about 50 million, 30.17 years after that
25 million, and so on, there is no way even in principle to predict when a given atom
of Cæsium-137 will decay into Barium. We can say that it has a fifty/fifty chance of
doing so in the next 30.17 years, but that's all we can say. Ever since physicists
realised how weird some of the implications of quantum mechanics were, appeals
have been made to “hidden variables” to restore some of the sense of order on which
classical physics was based. For example, suppose there's a little alarm clock inside
the Cæsium-137 nucleus which, when it rings, causes the electron to shoot out. Even
if we had no way to look at the dial of the clock, it's reassuring to believe it's there—it
would mean that even though our measurements show the universe to be, at the most
fundamental level, random, that's merely because we can't probe the ultimate innards
of the clockwork to expose its hidden deterministic destiny.

But hidden variables aren't the way our universe works—it really is random, right
down to its gnarly, subatomic roots. In 1964, the physicist John Bell proved a theorem
which showed hidden variable (little clock in the nucleus) theories inconsistent with
the foundations of quantum mechanics. In 1982, Alain Aspect and his colleagues
performed an experiment to test Bell's theoretical result and discovered, to nobody's
surprise, that the predictions of quantum theory were correct: the randomness is
inherent—not due to limitations in our ability to make measurements. So, given a
Cæsium-137 nucleus, there is no way whatsoever to predict when it will decay. If we
have a large number of them, we can be confident half will decay in 30.17 years; but
if we have a single atom, pinned in a laser ion trap, all we can say is that is there's
even odds it will decay sometime in the next 30.17 years, but as to precisely when
we're fundamentally quantum clueless. The only way to know when a given
Cæsium-137 nucleus decays is after the fact—by detecting the ejecta. A Cæsium-137
nucleus which has “beat the reaper” by surviving a century, during which time only
one in a thousand of its litter-mates haven't taken the plunge and turned into Barium,

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
has precisely the same chance of surviving another hundred years as a newly-minted
Cæsium-137, fresh from the reactor core.

Bit from It
This inherent randomness in decay time has profound implications, which we will
now exploit to generate random numbers—HotBits. For if there's no way to know
when a given Cæsium-137 nucleus will decay then, given an collection of them,
there's no way to know when the next one of them will shoot its electron bolt and
settle down to a serene eternity as Barium. That's uncertainty, with its origins in the
deepest and darkest corners of creation—precisely what we're looking for to make
genuinely random numbers.

If we knew the precise half-life of the radioactive source driving our detector (and
other details such as the solid angle to which our detector is sensitive, the energy
range of decay products and the sensitivity of the detector to them, and so on), we
could generate random bits by measuring whether the time between a pair of beta
decays was more or less than the time expected based on the half-life. But that would
require our knowing the average beta decay detection time, which depends on a large
number of parameters which can only be determined experimentally. Instead, we can
exploit the inherent uncertainty of decay time in a parameter-free fashion which
requires less arm waving and fancy footwork.

The trick I use was dreamed up in a conversation in 1985 with John Nagle, who is
doing some fascinating things these days with artificial animals. Since the time of any
given decay is random, then the interval between two consecutive decays is also
random. What we do, then, is measure a pair of these intervals, and emit a zero or one
bit based on the relative length of the two intervals. If we measure the same interval
for the two decays, we discard the measurement and try again, to avoid the risk of
inducing bias due to the resolution of our clock.

To create each random bit, we wait until the first count occurs, then measure the time,
T1, until the next. We then wait for a second pair of pulses and measure the interval
T2 between them, yielding a pair of durations. If they're the same, we throw away the
measurement and try again. Otherwise if T1 is less than T2 we emit a zero bit; if T1 is
greater than T2, a one bit. In practice, to avoid any residual bias resulting from non-
random systematic errors in the apparatus or measuring process consistently
favouring one state, the sense of the comparison between T1 and T2 is reversed for
consecutive bits.

For example, you might worry about the fact that the intensity of the radiation source
is slowly decreasing over time. Cæsium-137's 30.17 year half-life isn't all that long.
One half-life in the future, we'll measure T1 and T2 intervals, on the average, twice as
long as today. This means, then, that even on consecutive measurements there is a
small bias in favour of T2 being longer than T1. How serious is this? Well, expressed

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
in seconds, the half-life is about 9.5×108 and we receive count pulses at a rate of 1000
per second or so. So the time needed to perform the measurements to produce one
random bit is on the order of 10−12 half-lives, and T2 will then tend to be longer by a
factor of the same magnitude. Since the inter-count interval is around a millisecond,
this means T2 will be, on average, 10−15 seconds longer than T1. This is comparable
to the long-term accuracy of the best atomic time standards and is entirely negligible
for our purposes. The crystal oscillator which provides the time base for the computer
making the measurement is only accurate to 100 parts per million, or one part in ten
thousand, and thus can induce errors ten million times as large as those due to the
slow decay of the source. (This is, again, unlikely to be a real problem because most
computer clocks, while prone to drifting as temperature and supply voltage vary, do
not change significantly on the millisecond scale. Still, jitter due to where the clock
generator happens to trigger on the oscillator waveform will still dwarf the effects of
decay of the source during one measurement.)

The eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler has speculated that, at the deepest
level, the universe is made of information, and that all the complexity we see from the
subatomic to the cosmic scale is an emergent property of this underlying simplicity,
just as the simplest computer can, given enough time, faithfully simulate physical
processes far more complicated than itself. Wheeler calls this “it from bit”—matter,
energy, and the universe as a whole may be the consequences of the exchange and
processing of information. This may or may not be true, but in any case HotBits
brings the converse to your virtual desktop: information generated by a fundamental,
inherently unpredictable, subatomic process delivered directly to you over the Web.
Bit from it!

Serving 'em Hot and Fresh…

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
Finally, how does your request for HotBits get processed? You request HotBits by
filling out and transmitting a request form, which is sent by your World-Wide Web
browser in HTTP to our Web server, www.fourmilab.ch. Your request form is
processed by a CGI program written in Perl which, after validating the request,
forwards it in HTTP format to a dedicated HotBits server machine which is connected
to the HotBits generation hardware via the COM1 port

Why the indirection? Timing the intervals between decay events without the kind of
special-purpose hardware I used in my original 1986 design requires locking out
interrupts and dedicating the CPU to measuring the time between counts, since
otherwise other processes which use the CPU, even those as innocent as a screen
saver, could introduce nonrandom periodicities in the bitstream. Dedicating a
machine permits us to prevent interrupts and obtain maximum-resolution
measurements of the inter-count delays without compromising response time for
requests from the outside world.

To provide better response, each dedicated HotBits server machine maintains an

inventory of sixty-seven million (8192 kilobytes) random bits, and services requests
from this inventory whenever possible. The server rebuilds inventory in the
background, between user requests for HotBits.

Interposing the main www.fourmilab.ch servers also makes it possible to maintain a

separate inventory of HotBits on that machine, refreshed by periodically drawing
down the inventory on the HotBits server when it is full. A separate inventory on the

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
Web server permits faster response to requests since there is no need to contact a
dedicated HotBits machine as long as the request can be filled from local inventory.
Further, it allows uninterrupted service even when all primary HotBits generator
machines are down for maintenance. The main server inventory is maintained by a
HotBits Proxy Server running on that machine which communicates in the same
HTTP protocol as the dedicated HotBits machines. Source code for the HotBits
Generator and Proxy Server is in the public domain and is available for downloading;
it is intended to run on a Linux system and has been developed without concern for
portability to other Unix environments.

by John Walker

https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html