The nonlinear dynamics of transverse and polarization modes of a broad-area vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (BA-VCSEL) exhibit, without any external perturbation, chaos with high correlation dimension, large bandwidth (BW), and good spectral flatness over a wide range of currents. We leverage this for high bit-rate entropy generation and random number generation (RNG), passing the NIST tests with rates up to 150~Gb/s, and observe a correlation between the correlation dimension and the number of passed NIST tests. The RNG shows consistent performance across a wide range of parameters. In contrast to other setups, our system does not require optical feedback or optical injection to generate chaos, making it simple, compact and robust.
@article{arxiv.2604.06152,
title = {Random number generation from a self-chaotic broad-area VCSEL},
author = {Yohann G. Sanvert and Jules Mercadier and Stefan Bittner and Marc Sciamanna},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.06152},
year = {2026}
}