With neutrinos capable of traveling directly through Earth, is it possible to encode information on one end and decode on another, potentially creating the fastest data link between, say London and New York? We have a neutrino telescope close to our home and I was wondering if it can serve as a receiver with a neutrino emitter somewhere else?
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$\begingroup$ Maybe, but it's hard to switch neutrino beams quickly, and neutrino detection rates are abysmally low, so don't count on getting a high bit rate. $\endgroup$– PM 2RingCommented Jul 4, 2019 at 8:16
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$\begingroup$ Keep in mind that the very thing that makes neutrinos seem like such a good idea to use here as a communication medium also makes the question of the receiver into a very big problem. $\endgroup$– The_SympathizerCommented Jul 4, 2019 at 8:34
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$\begingroup$ Previously: physics.stackexchange.com/q/76531/520 physics.stackexchange.com/q/199606/520 physics.stackexchange.com/q/12834/520 $\endgroup$– dmckee --- ex-moderator kittenCommented Jul 5, 2019 at 15:24
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3 Answers
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Well, I don't know whether this is practical, but in principle it is possible. See for instance Demonstration of communication using neutrinos on the arXiv. The researchers report transmitting data at 0.1 bits/sec over more than a kilometer, including 240m of earth (and with a bit error rate of 1%).
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It is plausible, but would be very difficult. From the transmission side it would be hard to generate modulated pulses of neutrinos. One would need considerable control over the weak nuclear processes used to generate them. The Fermilab Tevatron generates a beam of neutrinos for the MiniBooNE experiment. That is not a practical transmitter at this time.
The detection part is maybe more plausible. Dark matter experiments seek to detect a neutral current interactions with a nucleus in a crystal lattice. The interaction results in a phonon in the crystal that is detected. This might serve as the receiving antenna for a neutrino signal. Just as with putative dark matter a neutral current interaction between a neutrino and a nucleus, one which would be a flavor changing interaction, would vibrate the lattice of a crystal. Of course filtering out all the noise from cosmic rays and background radiation would be a challenge.
answered Jul 4, 2019 at 11:00
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$\begingroup$ Generating modulated pulses is easy. Really easy. The ability to steer beam bunches into different channels is all you need and doing that on a nanosecond time-scale is well understood (see CEBAF for an example). Note that neutrino comm would use on-off in time (like wireless telegraph or ultra-wideband wifi) rather than AM or FM style modulations of a continuous signal. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 5, 2019 at 15:27
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No, it's not possible. Neutrinos almost never interact with matter, so they are impossible to manipulate, or if by some miracle you managed to do that, to decode them at the other end. A flood of trillions of neutrinos from a nuclear reactor or bomb might be detectable by a neutrino telescope, but it would be an extremely clumsy and inefficient way of sending a signal. Neutrino telescopes are not the precise and accurate instruments that other forms of telescopes are. We already have means of sending intricate messages to the opposite side of the world at the speed of light, so no useful purpose would be achieved by a neutrino signalling system.
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$\begingroup$ "We already have means of sending intricate messages to the opposite side of the world at the speed of light" - do we? Undersea cables take a significant detour - 1.57x in the best case of optimally laid cables, and they won't be laid optimally. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 4, 2019 at 9:11
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$\begingroup$ When I was in the Army, we used to send messages from Borneo to Hereford with quite primitive equipment, and radio waves are just a longer wavelength version of light. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 4, 2019 at 9:19
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$\begingroup$ Radio waves don't go through the ground... $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 4, 2019 at 10:57
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$\begingroup$ I never said they did. Ours went through the atmosphere, and they travelled at the speed of light. Our radio equipment was really primitive,WW2 vintage. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 4, 2019 at 11:01
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1$\begingroup$ Ignoring the side issue of whether around-the-ionosphere signals are equivalent to through-the-planet signals (yes for some purposes, no for others), "No, it's not possible." is simply wrong. It's even been done at a demonstration level, and the only issues with scaling up to production are the low achievable bandwidth and the tension between the insane costs and limited unique used cases. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 5, 2019 at 16:53