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Demonstration of Communication using Neutrinos (2012) (arxiv.org)
65 points by lainon on Oct 8, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 23 comments


"0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth."

I'm not sure that's much better than ULF, with similar issues on the size/cost of the transmitter.

They do mention interstellar communication though.


One bit is sufficient if you are just trying to arbitrage markets. For a couple billion, an NYC to Tokyo neutrino shortcut wouldn't be a bad investment.


There is latency involved in both production and detection to contend with.

NYC to Tokyo would require an unprecedented beamline angled deep down into the earth as well as a much more powerful proton driver to produce enough neutrinos to compensate for the 1/r^2 loss of flux.

And, then there is the neutrino oscillation resonance due to the high matter density as the neutrinos pass near the Earth's core just to mix things up.

The price tag for DUNE is a couple billion USD for a relatively "short" baseline of 1300 km and 40kton far detector.

All that said, if some fat cat trader wants to fund it, I'll help build it.


Any individual bit could be noise, so it might take 2-3 bits to transmit something unambiguous (via an error-correcting code or similar).

If so, I think the speed advantage disappears.


Detecting one pulse above background noise is not terrible, according to the paper. However, the way the paper sets up their communications channel is kind of silly, since they are pulse rate limited.

If you wanted to transmit a lot of information with one pulse, you'd use time domain slicing and synchronized atomic clocks.

Regardless, you don't need particularly high signal fidelity in order to arbitrage the market, just better than 50/50. The ~25ms they can cut off of the transmission latency is an eternity in market time.


What if the whole universe is full of life using Neutrino's for communiction and we just don't get it.


I'd recommend Stanislav Lem's His master's voice :)


That was my first thought as well


You have to wonder how they scale it.


From discussions about this it seems like the consensus is that the nature of neutrinos would kill any attempt to make this method of communication scale. But boy it would cool to have straight line communication between any two points on earth no infrastructure required.


> no infrastructure required

O(1) infrastructure required


Maybe aomix meant 0! ;)


What breakthroughs would be required to make this feasible for something the size of a flip phone?


Not doable. A neutrino detector, including radiation shielding, cannot be the size of a flip phone.



No, that wouldn't help.

Please look at the picture: you can see a neutrino detector being held. But what's also very important to detect neutrinos is shielding from every other type of radiation, so that you can differentiate between neutrino radiation and everything else. The shielding is done by metallic (likely, lead) bars around the detector. The shielding is much more massive than the detector.

Another point: in the article they say that they have detected a 136 neutrino events over 461 days. So you can transfer one bit ~10 days. Neutrino detector sensitivity scales linearly with volume. Now imagine if you scale down your ~5-10 liter detector to a volume of 0.2 liters (a fliphone volume).

Which is to say, not doable.


I’m thinking we’d need new physics discoveries. Maybe elements from the island of stability might help. Or something with superconductors. You never know.


Given that these things are neutral and effortlessly fly out of collapsing supernova cores, heavier elements and superconductors are not very likely to help.


By our current understanding, superconductors only exist under extreme cold, a condition never occurring naturally in stars and supernovas. So the fact that neutrinos fly out effortlessly does not preclude the possibility of a superconducting trap of neutrinos.


There is nothing about a superconductor that would trap a neutrino.


If new physics are allowed then it's simple. We just need a Neutrino detector that fits in a phone and doesn't need too much electricity.


That would require a phone made out of something other than matter.


What if the phones connect to the neutrino detector central server? The only latency would be getting to the server...




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