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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.

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.)

jerf 6y ago
"in terms of latency, it should be the fastest." Unfortunately, not even then. Nowadays you generally neglect the latency of the physical act of receiving a bit and being sure whether it is a one or a zero because it is such a small amount of time compared to the other characteristics of the journey, but in this case you can't do that. The amount of time it will take to be sure whether it's a 1 or a 0 being sent will be dwarfed by the amount of time it would take to send a conventional TCP packet containing significantly more than one bit. Note that while we neglect it, it still exists. If you zoom down to a small enough scale, you don't get a pristine series of ones and zeros, but a noisy voltage or light signal, and there can be plenty of attoseconds where the current voltage/light could correspond to either a 0 or a 1 coming in next.
balfirevic 6y ago
> 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. No, that's not the reason. The reason is that they barely interact with anything, including detection equipment. > even a 99.99% loss / non-detection rate shouldn't be problem. "Two water-filled detectors of this type (Kamiokande and IMB) recorded a neutrino burst from supernova SN 1987A. Scientists detected 19 neutrinos from an explosion of a star inside the Large Magellanic Cloud – only 19 out of the octo-decillion (10^57) neutrinos emitted by the supernova." (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector)

jerf 6y ago

"in terms of latency, it should be the fastest." Unfortunately, not even then. Nowadays you generally neglect the latency of the physical act of receiving a bit and being sure whether it is a one or a zero because it is such a small amount of time compared to the other characteristics of the journey, but in this case you can't do that. The amount of time it will take to be sure whether it's a 1 or a 0 being sent will be dwarfed by the amount of time it would take to send a conventional TCP packet containing significantly more than one bit. Note that while we neglect it, it still exists. If you zoom down to a small enough scale, you don't get a pristine series of ones and zeros, but a noisy voltage or light signal, and there can be plenty of attoseconds where the current voltage/light could correspond to either a 0 or a 1 coming in next.

balfirevic 6y ago

> 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. No, that's not the reason. The reason is that they barely interact with anything, including detection equipment. > even a 99.99% loss / non-detection rate shouldn't be problem. "Two water-filled detectors of this type (Kamiokande and IMB) recorded a neutrino burst from supernova SN 1987A. Scientists detected 19 neutrinos from an explosion of a star inside the Large Magellanic Cloud – only 19 out of the octo-decillion (10^57) neutrinos emitted by the supernova." (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector)