7 ms·

I'm not very well versed on the physics, but every time neutrinos come up, I wonder when can we establish a data link that goes through the earth, instead of ar

• whatshisface 6y ago
  It's possible today but not economically practical. You could get low-latency messages, but you would miss most of the bits coming through.
  • Ciantic 6y ago
    Interesting, care to elaborate more? I haven't found that it's even possible with long distances like that. If corporates are literally blowing holes to mountains to get faster and more direct data links between trading places. Then it sounds like just a question of time when the technology matures enough (if it's possible already).
    • Evidlo 6y ago
      Here's an article about communicating with neutrino beams: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/message-encoded-in-neutrino-beam-transmitted-through-solid-rock/#:~:text=Neutrinos%20are%20having%20a%20moment.&text=Neutrinos%20have%20been%20proposed%20for,screen%20out%20most%20other%20particles https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/message-en.... In short, they were able to achieve about 0.1 bps with hardware that costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
      • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Also note that the distance transmitted is a mere kilometer. Carrier pigeons are more practical
      • est31 6y ago
        That's only two orders of magnitude away from a 100bps line, which would incur 10 ms latency due to the transmission method (in addition to the latency of the neutrinos actually having to get there), and that's for reliable communication. Unreliable communication that gives you an advantage over mere chance 1% of the time can already be advantageous, you'll be right 51% of the time.
        • macintux 6y ago
          Three orders.
          • est31 6y ago
            Thanks, got that wrong. My comment was more of a thought experiment than an expression of actual belief that it might work.
    • afthonos 6y ago
      That image was captured over 503 days of exposure, with a detector the size of a swimming pool. I won’t claim it’s impossible, but I’ll give you fantastic odds against it in the next, say, twenty years.
      • drdrey 6y ago
        And that's with a pretty decent source of neutrinos
      • lokedhs 6y ago
        Surface area, yes. But it's 40 metres deep, so significantly larger volume.
    • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Blowing holes in miuntains is junior league for nuclear physics. The exact same factor that allows neutrinos to pass through a planet make them impossible to work with. The detector here weighs 50,000,000kg, and still like 99.9..% of neutrinos pass though it without being detected - imagine that kind of signal loss in a data link. This detector does not notice tiny amount of neutrinos produced at particle accelerators. It would have to placed right next to a 4GW nuclear powerplant to detect neurinos at any kind of reasonable rate. The only man made source of neutrinos you could detect from another continent is a massive thermonuclear blast. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405601415010494 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240560141...
      • prawn 6y ago
        "The only man made source of neutrinos you could detect from another continent is a massive thermonuclear blast." So, you're saying there's a chance?
  • cryptonector 6y ago
    All you need is one bit: silence -> neutral!, 0 -> buy!, 1 -> sell! Or two: 00 -> neutral!, 01 -> sell!, 02 -> buy!, 11 -> wait! Plus error correction... When you add error correction and consider the number of missed bits and the need to retransmit / keep transmitting, it's probably not possible to realize a latency win here.
    • close04 6y ago
      Think about it like this: the absolute vast majority of neutrinos pass through the whole planet without interacting with a single particle. One descriptive saying is that a neutrino can pass through 100 light-years of steel without interacting. This puts in context how hard it is to detect them (have them interact with your detector). So your communication turns into some random string of detections where you never know if the absence of a detection means there was no neutrino, or it was just missed.
    • mhh__ 6y ago
      > latency win Perhaps, but if you consider the probability of missing an individual neutrino your error correcting scheme will have to be either very long or very clever because your odds of collecting the right neutrino at the right time will go down very quickly as the packet gets longer. On top of that, if you used some kind of pulse scheme (i.e. morse code with neutrinos) it has to be slow enough to be detectable, but fast enough to beat the latency of a cable (let's say 100ms - speed of light + processing and errors) and also fast enough not to use enough power as to be unprofitable.
      • cryptonector 6y ago
        > Perhaps, but ... Isn't that what I wrote: > > it's probably not possible to realize a latency win here ? > On top of that, if you used some kind of pulse scheme (i.e. morse code with neutrinos) it has to be slow "slow pulse" == long pulse. It will be "fast" in that it will go faster than the speed of light in fiberoptics and the path will be shorter, but it will be slower because error correction will demand a great deal of redundancy which, among other things, means long pulses. I think we're in agreement.
• qubex 6y ago
  You can easily send them through the earth because they are hard to detect: it’s two sides of how low their interaction is. What’s the point sending data that you cannot pick up? Femilab could probably modulate their bean to Oklahoma (or wherever the detector is located) but you can’t work up enough bandwidth for it to be worthwhile. Ever, for anything.
• jfengel 6y ago
  It was kicked around a few years ago as a way to get a jump on competitors in high-frequency trading: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4646 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4646 It's not impossible, but it's kind of absurd. Neutrinos are insanely hard to detect. You need immense detectors, and even you get only a ludicrously tiny fraction of the neutrinos passing through. You'd have to modulate it by turning on and off an immense nuclear power plant, so despite shaving off milliseconds of latency you still wouldn't be able to communicate fast. There's no reason to expect any of that to become more practical any time soon. Neutrinos are too small, too fast, and too devoid of interaction to manipulate easily.
  • anfractuosity 6y ago
    Heh, they talk about neutrinos for HFT in 'The Hummingbird Project' briefly - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6866224/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6866224/
  • marcosdumay 6y ago
    > You'd have to modulate it by turning on and off an immense nuclear power plant A particle accelerator would be much more responsive. The immense detectors on the other side would stay, and you'll need entire minutes just to get a single neutrino anyway (and then, how many do you need to be sure? at least 2, I imagine.)
    • piyh 6y ago
      Really you'd need a duplex connection, so double the accelerators and detectors.
  • winter_blue 6y ago
    Would a concentrated high-energy beam of neutrinos be easier to detect? There was a new HN thread about such a beam just an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528970 We'd modulate this high-energy beam. Data bandwidth would likely be quite low, but in terms of latency, it should be the fastest. A beam directly going through Earth (e.g. from North America to Asia) is definitely going to be faster than optical fibre (or satellite) links that have wrap around the Earth. I'm assuming neutrinos are sparse in nature, which is 50,000 metric ton pool of water was needed to detect the neutrinos emanating from the sun. But if we artificially create a highly concentrated beam of many many neutrinos, even a 99.99% loss / non-detection rate shouldn't be problem. (Again, bandwidth would be low, but we are aiming to minimize latency.)
• arethuza 6y ago
  Yottawatt level fusion power generation levels has been demonstrated at about 1% of solar output. Maybe those could be used in a pattern to send messages? ;-)
• csunbird 6y ago
  What about using neutrinos for interplanetary communication between ground bases on different planets? Since they are hard to be stopped by any kind of matter, it should be a good way of ensuring the link stays stable with only one base, instead of having 3 or 4 depending on Earth's location and day cycles.
• ufmace 6y ago
  I'm gonna say not at all. First, you have to modulate the source in such a way as to encode a message. I think we can rule out things that involve blocking the beam, so you'll have to adjust the generation power. You're gonna need a massively powerful nuclear reactor or particle accelerator or something to be at all possible to notice the message, so it will probably be pretty tough to modulate that much power at a frequency high enough to get any kind of decent data rate. Then we need a detector. Since the article is about a massive and massively expensive detector being able to create sort of an image of the Sun after multiple years of observation, I'm not optimistic about that side. We can build a detector that can tell if a manmade beam is on or off, eventually. I'm not very optimistic about building a detector sensitive enough to detect subtle variations in the power of the beam. We're gonna have a real tough time getting a decent data rate. Doesn't make much difference if 1 bit can be transmitted through the earth faster than an electric signal can make it around if the electronic one can send billions of bits in the time the neutrino detector takes to send two.
  • heavenlyblue 6y ago
    You could just steer the beam away
    • lopmotr 6y ago
      You can't make a directed neutrino beam because the direction they're emitted in a reaction is random. That includes particle accelerators which make neutrinos by colliding other particles. A single reaction product comes out in a random direction even though the momentum and energy of them all together are conserved.
      • gus_massa 6y ago
        The beam is directional. From https://home.cern/science/accelerators/cern-neutrinos-gran-sasso https://home.cern/science/accelerators/cern-neutrinos-gran-s... > To create the neutrino beam, a beam of protons from the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN was directed onto a graphite target. The collisions created particles called pions and kaons, which were fed into a system of two magnetic lenses that focused the particles into a parallel beam in the direction of Gran Sasso. The pions and kaons then decayed into muons and muon neutrinos in a 1-kilometre tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, a block of graphite and metal 18 metres thick absorbed protons as well as pions and kaons that did not decay. Muons were stopped by the rock beyond, but the muon neutrinos remained to streak through the rock on their journey to Italy.