6 ms·
Neutrino tomography of Earth
- jboggan 8y agoThis is really brilliant, literally jaw-dropping. I was really blown away by the idea and construction of the detector itself and this application is astounding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
- gpuhacker 8y agoYou may like KM3NeT then (http://www.km3net.org/ http://www.km3net.org/). The goal is to build a cubic kilometer spanning instrument at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
- dark_star 8y agoWikipedia has a good artist's conception picture of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM3NeT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM3NeT
- bacon_waffle 8y agoMy favourite story about the construction of IceCube relates to the drilling of the holes to deploy the detector. They used two types of drill, which melt the firn (compacted snow) on top and ice lower down. One is a sort of conical heat exchanger, the other circulates water through a Big water heater on the surface. In the early days of South Pole Station (late 1950s), supplies were airdropped in - the cargo planes of that era couldn't land on the snow and going overland was very difficult. Many of the parachutes wouldn't open properly, and so lots of supplies (including a bulldozer) and parachutes wound up buried in the snow. South Pole slowly accumulates snow, so that debris has gotten deeper and deeper below the surface over time. Of course, the holes required to build IceCube had to go deeper than those supplies, but the drill can't go through things that don't melt, so in some cases the holes had to be moved off the nominal grid. According to the story I heard, one of the holes ran in to a bunch of meat, which floated to the top of the bore...
- sohkamyung 8y agoNo mentions about finding meat here, but you might be interested in this story at IEEE Spectrum about the construction of IceCube from 2011 [1]. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/icecube-the-polar-particle-hunter https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/icecube-the...
- ArtWomb 8y agoAgreed. This is truly astounding. Neutrinos seem to encapsulate an unnaturally high degree of complexity and information in such a tiny package ;) Formalism of Neutrino Oscillations https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.05781.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.05781.pdf
- oh_sigh 8y agoI always thought that if an alien civilization is trying to communicate with earth, they would do it via neutrinos and not radio waves, because if you know where you are communicating to, you don't need to worry about signal attenuation as much as with EM waves.
- phkahler 8y agoWould it be feasible to put a source and detector in orbit so we could get high resolution CT images of the interior of the earth? IIRC the detector used here is very large, but there are smaller ones and a directed source would go a long way towards making the detection simpler.
- gpuhacker 8y agoAn in space detector is (at least to my understanding) not that easy, as you need the surface of the Earth to interact with the neutrinos. These interactions result in muons, which allow to detect that there was a neutrino in the first place. Also, there is a pretty big source for neutrinos pretty close to Earth, but Earth is in its orbit, as opposed to the other way around.
- not2b 8y agoThe IceCube neutrino detector consists of about a cubic kilometer of ice. You're not going to put one of those in orbit.
- gpuhacker 8y agoExactly
- logfromblammo 8y agoYou might be able to tow it in from elsewhere using a light sail, however. Beyond our current technology, but might be doable by 2100, or sooner with a fortuitous comet trajectory.
- dotancohen 8y agoAnd once it is in orbit, how do you propose stationkeeping against exospheric drag? Preferably a solution that will remain reliable for 10^n (n>>3) years.
- Balgair 8y agoSupplementary Figure 6 is pretty cool! There seems to be a lot of strange things happening at the mantle-crust boundary that will take some further study to understand. All said, this is a MAJOR advance in our understanding of the Earth and the science thereof. This technique should allow for some pretty amazing things in the future.
- stocknosticator 8y agohttps://mobile.twitter.com/stocknosticator/status/742539156090281984 https://mobile.twitter.com/stocknosticator/status/7425391560... Looks like my prediction will come true.
- richardbdrowley 8y ago> Neutrino detection will revolutionize oil and other natural resource discovery. No.
- godelski 8y agoTo be fair, it probably will. But the ability to do it in a cheap enough manner is certainly far enough away that the value of those resources will likely be much lower than they are today. Accurate, cheap, and small neutrino detectors would revolutionize any industry dependent upon locating things within... well... anything. But that statement is as meaningful (if not less) as "faster computers will revolutionize the automotive industry."
- caf 8y agoIn theory, would IceCube be able to detect neutrinos generated by the same mechanism in the atmosphere of Venus?
- sohkamyung 8y agoIn theory, yes. In practice, probably very difficult. They did detect a deficit in neutrinos from the direction of the moon though [1]. [1] https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/131 https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/131
- k_sze 8y agoCould this technique be useful on other planets?
- peter303 8y agoFrankly this idea has been repeated every few years since the invention of tomography 40 years ago. Hopefully someone will actually do it one of these years.
- lolc 8y agoNice but I'm still left wondering what the J/bit of neutrino transmission would be. Wouldn't it be cool if we could replace the long fiber optics stretching around the globe with direct-through neutrino stations?
- russdill 8y agoGiven the difficulty in neutrino detection, I seriously doubt it would replace fat links. You could gain quite a bit of advantage when it comes to trading though using a low bandwidth link.
- mnw21cam 8y agohttps://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ gives a fairly decent summary of the level of interaction of neutrinos.