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Neutrino communication actually implemented

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Thu, 2012-03-15 08:29

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Neutrino communication actually implemented

I admit I felt neutrino comms in EP to be mildly unlikely when I read it. I shouldn't have: it has just been done in reality. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27648/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847 Way cool. If still rather impractical.

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Thu, 2012-03-15 16:53

Decivre

Re: Neutrino communication actually implemented

I figured it would be possible down the line. After all, if it can be transmitted in wave form, that wave can contain information. The only problem is reception; transmissions that go through everything are received by nothing, so the hardest part about using neutrinos for communication is to find something that can reliably grab and decode data from a neutrino signal. Of course, there's the problem. Today, neutrino "receivers" are massive pools of water with no external light exposure. That's not very cost effective as a means of communication. Until we can shrink it down a bit (read: a whole hell of a lot), it's simply not feasible to look at this as the next great invention since radio.

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]

Fri, 2012-03-16 14:55

Foucault

Re: Neutrino communication actually implemented

Yea, I've always had a problem with Neutrino comms. I have a friend who was doing his physics phd on supernova neutrinos and we thought the idea was unrealistic. You need huge detector filled water, and you really can't improve the interaction cross section that much. So if you can't be sure you detect every neutrino your broadcaster sends, you'll need a good error-correcting algorithm. But I guess they figured that part out.

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Fri, 2012-03-16 16:07

Decivre

Re: Neutrino communication actually implemented

Foucault wrote:
Yea, I've always had a problem with Neutrino comms. I have a friend who was doing his physics phd on supernova neutrinos and we thought the idea was unrealistic. You need huge detector filled water, and you really can't improve the interaction cross section that much. So if you can't be sure you detect every neutrino your broadcaster sends, you'll need a good error-correcting algorithm. But I guess they figured that part out.

Yeah, but down the line our ability to capture and detect neutrinos will likely improve. Remember, we first detected the damn things 56 years ago. Give us a century or so more, and I'm sure we'll find a more reliable way to intercept them.

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]

Wed, 2012-03-21 23:12

rfmcdonald rfmcdonald's picture

Re: Neutrino communication actually implemented

Agreed. In my blog post on it, http://abitmoredetail.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/brief-note-on-the-latest-... I noted that neutrino communications systems might actually be relevant for submarines, which can currently only communicate with surface facilities using extremely low frequency radio waves that a) penetrate only a hundred metres of water and b) only transmit data at 50 bits per second. Improve this speed by a couple of orders of magnitude and shrink the size of the detector (the MINERvA detector at Fermilab masses five tons apparently) and you've got a competitve technology.

Thu, 2012-03-22 05:48

Decivre

Re: Neutrino communication actually implemented

rfmcdonald wrote:
Improve this speed by a couple of orders of magnitude and shrink the size of the detector (the MINERvA detector at Fermilab masses five tons apparently) and you've got a competitve technology.

Not just competitive, game-changing. Imagine the capability to communicate securely with almost any location on Earth, with little chance of being jammed. Even if there was a country that had the tech necessary to jam you, they'd have to time their transmission identically to yours, or expend ludicrous amounts of energy producing neutrino transmissions all day long. Either one is fairly infeasible. Suddenly we have near-unjammable long-distance pulse communications. Perfect for all sorts of applications around the system. Can you say high-fidelity Earth-Mars comms?

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Transhumans will one day be the Luddites of the posthuman age. [url=http://bit.ly/2p3wk7c]Help me get my gaming fix, if you want.[/url]