CERN researchers have observed and generated high-energy neutrino radiation | Hacker News Reader

CERN researchers have observed and generated high-energy neutrino radiation

bigthink.com

186 pointsBrajeshwar50 comments

If we can both generate and detect neutrinos, we have the basis for a communication device that can operate on a point-to-point basis between any two locations. If Europe wants to send a secret message to Australia, it can point its transmitter towards the ground, and fire the beam through the interior of the Earth. It is very unlikely that there will be anybody in between to intercept the signal.

There may be more practical alternatives of course…

If anyone does it, it will be financial firms putting them under stock exchanges to get milliseconds of advantage over anyone following the curvature of the earth.

This implies financial feasibility. It still takes a super collider on one end and a detection tank on the other. But one day it might be feasible. I would think a military warning system would be implemented before a financial aid.

Or a high speed link with all the submarines. It's really hard to communicate with a submarines hundreds of metres under water as radio waves don't go through that much water.

> I would think a military warning system would be implemented before a financial aid.

In this world? Eeeh, I doubt it.

What value would the military get from knowing a piece of information a few milliseconds faster?

Direct transmission through the earth could be as much as a quarter second faster than around the circumference. A hypersonic missile can travel about a half of a kilometer in a quarter second. So, any application where a half kilometer or quarter second head start might make a difference. The only thing I can think of where the stakes are high enough and timing critical enough is nuclear deterrence. But as hypersonic missiles and planes get faster, there could be other advantages.

LEO orbit period is 90min, so it takes at least 40min for a missile to go halfway around the globe.

Going in straight line across the earth at the speed of light takes 42ms. Going around the earth at the speed of light takes 66ms. Let's be extremely pessimistic and double that estimate at 132ms. Going through the earth saved you 90ms in this best case.

You saved 90ms over 40min. A ratio of 0.0000375, or 0.00375%.

There is no way it makes any sense to spend billions to save 0.00375% in response time to an incoming missile.

Your analysis is valid as long as one of the following are true:

1) We learn to bend light around the surface of the earth (otherwise relays are needed, which add significant delay).

2) hypersonic missiles are required to a) go into LEO and b) go all the way around the earth to benefit from a quarter second head start

I still think military warning applications are much more likely than someone trying to do HFT on the NYSE from Australia. But, like I said from the beginning. Neither are feasible because they need a super collider and a massive tank detector.

Submarine communication actually.

the shadows are so dark (or the secrecy so official?)....that for all we are able to know, they already done it.

We would see decisions being made that aren't physically possible with current technology. Also the number of people who would need to keep something like this a secret would be on par with that of a fake moon landing.

If their application of the technology were so secret that we couldn't tell it existed, then it wasn't worth whatever they paid.

Presumably it would be used in the case where a split-second decision is the difference between success and failure.

> If their application of the technology were so secret that we couldn't tell it existed, then it wasn't worth whatever they paid.

I would posit that, were a system like this feasible and already implemented by the military, we wouldn’t hear about this until the football has to be activated.

There is no single other decision as monumental and requiring of extremely precise timing. And it’s not a decision that is used very often or would be obvious if something “not physically possible” were done since it happens in secret. It’s pretty much the perfect usecase for such a technology.

That's fair. The original post was suggesting corporations were actively using it for lower trade latency. That seems very unlikely. But having the technology in our back pocket for military use? That's believable.

Though I think everyone secretly knows that, in the Mexican standoff that is a nuclear stalemate, if one side launches all their nukes, the best outcome for everyone is for the other side to just let it happen. This would afford any survivors the best chance at rebuilding. The important part is the threat of what you can do, not what you actually do.

What is the football?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_football

> We would see decisions being made that aren’t physically possible with current technology.

Or we wouldn’t, because it would only be used where an alternative information cover story could be concocted or where the decision and action itself could be kept secret, to avoid exposing the capability.

>We would see decisions being made that aren't physically possible with current technology.

i'm not aware enough of what any world government is doing at any given time to confidently assert that so easily.

From my understanding most exchanges put in artificial limits now to ensure anyone with mega bucks for infrastructure are equal

I think this is on the last mile, but doesn't apply outside of that. E.g., the length of cord in the exchange is the same, but outside of that it's your infrastructure.

Your understanding is false. That’s exactly how HRT, Jane, Jump, Millennium make so much money

This was studied decades ago. IIRC the effective bit rate, at least with the detector tech at that time, was insanely slow, like a few bytes per hour (or maybe even per day).

As long as the latency isn't also hours/a day, it could still be useful, even if just one byte, as you could communicate what that byte means out-of-band. So catastrophe-detection systems could use it as an example.

If a byte takes 15 minutes, your latency is the time of flight plus 15 minutes.

Just need to have a satellite orbiting behind

> If we can both generate and detect neutrinos, we have the basis for a communication device that can operate on a point-to-point basis between any two locations.

AIUI, you’ll need a much bigger detector farther from the beam location, and the bandwidth is going to suck at any range, but, sure, the odds that someone sticks a neutrino detector in the path is pretty low.

This is an awesome update. It was only in 2018 that a high energy neutrino was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (funny name lol) that was traced back to its source, a blazar. This was a active galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. That was the first time ever that scientists had identified the source of a high energy neutrino, and now scientists generated a whole new avenue of research in astrophysics with this. :)

> IceCube Neutrino Observatory (funny name lol)

It's also an incredibly descriptive and literal name - the observatory is a cubic kilometer of photosensitive detectors frozen in ice at the south pole. When a neutrino interacts with the ice, it produces cherenkov radiation, which can be detected and sent up the chain to a server to classify what was actually detected.

The energy of the IceCube neutrinos is 2 to 4 orders of magnitude higher than the ones detected by this experiment. But this is still cool because it's the highest energy neutrinos detected from man-made sources.

See slide 13 here: https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/29681/contributions/122474/att...

IceCube also likes to name their events after Sesame Street characters, so you’d get things like Bert and Ernie events. Not sure if they still do since you eventually run out of characters.

its possible you havent been keeping up with sesame street, because no they won't.

I think that the unusual thing was that they identified extragalactic neutrinos.

Yeah, wasn't it Sheldon Cooper who discovered that?

- JK

Direct link to the source: https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/29681/contributions/122474/att...

Neutrino bomb incoming? Where can I read about proposed weapons using neutrinos?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

Great line in this one:

[...]The physicist who mentioned this problem to me told me his rule of thumb for estimating supernova-related numbers: However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that.

Here's a question to give you a sense of scale:

Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:

  1. A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or

  2. The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?

Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is ... by nine orders of magnitude.

I mean, I knew the supernova would be brighter, but BY NINE orders of magnitude was still surprising! wow!

Direct dosage isn’t the only possibility though. Could be used to start a nuclear chain reaction, for example.

We could also find a novel way to unlock the amount of energy required for direct lethal dosage, analogous to how we figured out how to split atoms

Start a power plant meltdown or detonate an enemy's weapon stockpiles...from anywhere?

Is there even a theoretical way that this could happen? Seems essentially impossible. The whole thing with neutrinos is they just _don't_ interact with anything except _extremely_ rarely.

No. There is some evidence that a large flux of neutrinos can very slightly alter the rate of some nuclear beta decay (basically the decay which would release a neutrino can't if there are too many neutrinos already around it), but that won't do anything to trigger a nuclear weapon or nuclear plant meltdown. Even producing enough neutrinos to have a detectable effect at all would require a tremendous amount of energy - attempts to even detect such an effect on earth have been inconclusive. The only place in the universe where the neutron flux gets high enough to actually delay decay for a meaningful amount of time is in the core of a supernova, which is one way heavy elements are produced.

> The only place in the universe where the neutron flux gets high enough to actually delay decay for a meaningful amount of time is in the core of a supernova, which is one way heavy elements are produced.

That's very cool.

They can’t be focused, so if it did succeed - it would cook everything anywhere near it just as much. So think ‘interplanetary death ray’, not ‘surgical strike’.

Neutralink

> they have observed and generated in the laboratory

[Insert mandatory Three Body Problem reference here]

To be honest, I've read the first and second books and not entirely sure what you mean.

There's a scene at the end of the second book where the aliens offer to build a neutrino communication device for humans but the humans opt for one that uses gravity waves instead. It's a very brief reference, I don't know why the parent would have brought it up.

Yeah, I was misremembering; I thought they actually did end up using high energy neutrinos.

I am finishing up the third one and also have no idea.

Many people have thought about neutrino comms

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