13 ms·
Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly
- manpagereader 5y agoWe used to do this by opening a port in the shield over an x-ray source and detecting it with the predecessor of digital x-ray sensors back in the lab, sending morse code.
- kingcharles 5y agoIn Soviet Russia all email radioactive.
- daly 5y agoSubmarine communication. Acoustic signals can be detected at VERY long distances. These signals cannot. Spy communication from inside a nuclear facility.
- rbanffy 5y agoIn essence, they have invented the cellphone that actually causes cancer ;-)
- daniel-cussen 5y agoI've heard there's a lot of prior art.
- rbanffy 5y agoNeutron bombardment is unhealthy, but it was never used for communication until now.
- daniel-cussen 5y agoI mean about a cell phone that causes cancer, it's too late to patent that.
- raldi 5y agoThe article doesn't state what distance they were able to transmit over.
- java-man 5y agoDuring the Cold War, I've heard rumors of one directional communication system with submarines using neutrinos. I don't know what the utility of the system described in the article though - neutrons will be absorbed pretty quickly, so the communication must have a very short range.
- ed 5y agoIt takes something like 18 light years of lead to attenuate a neutrino beam by half, so they’d need a pretty big receiver :)
- Accujack 5y agoIt's possible to detect neutrinos with a scintillation chamber, but in general only a tiny fraction of neutrinos passing through would be observed. They really don't interact with regular matter much. However, it's the transmitter that would be nearly impossible, because blocking neutrinos or affecting them in such a way as to modulate the beam would be extremely difficult. I think we can probably rule out neutrino based communications during the cold war, especially since VLF did the job just fine.
- java-man 5y agoThe "rumor" referred to an array of scintillators dragged behid the submarine, with the ocean water as a detecting medium. In theory, with clear enough water and large enough detector volume, that idea might work. I vaguely recall data rate of less than one bit per second.
- extrapickles 5y agoThat sounds a lot like the ELF radio system they used, which basically was used to order submarines to surface (or near enough) to receive new orders as the bandwidth was <1 baud. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency
- FredPret 5y agoThis is probably the tech that drives the Pip-Boy
- danbruc 5y agoIn case someone else is wondering, they modulated the neutron beam by pneumatically moving a polyethylene block in front of the Californium source which sits inside a one cubic meter water tank and can be pneumatically moved close to one of the walls for activation. The data rate was about one bit every ten seconds.
- kingcharles 5y agoThat's about the same speed I get when I run out of "high speed" data on my mobile phone plan.
- yosito 5y agoSounds like a more radioactive version of smoke signals.
- version_five 5y agoAt this bitrate, and over short distances - maybe 1m, a rotating permanent magnet (or a powerful electromagnet) could also be competitive. It wouldn't work for anything with a high magnetic permeability (like iron) but for non magnetic metal or water a static field would penetrate at least a short distance, enough to go through a wall. (BTW, I've imagined that in the distant future, we'll have gravity wave generators and detectors that don't have the same constraints as EM based data transmissions. I don't know how realistic this is.
- fouronnes3 5y agoReminds me of that paper I read a long time ago, about how we could detect advanced alien civilizations by analysing pulsar signals. The hypothesis was that they would put massive devices in orbit of pulsars to modulate their high energy signals to use as ultra long range communication. Presumably pulsars would be the only strong enough carrier wave.
- version_five 5y agoNow I'm imagining a future where some modulated binary star merger is being used to stream episodes over Netflix. Hopefully we manage to find a way to miniaturize things.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we ban such accounts because we're trying for a different sort of discussion here. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- jhallenworld 5y agoBut won't the range be limited by neutron decay?
- jjk166 5y agoThermal neutrons move at approximately 2000 m/s, with a half life of about 612 seconds. Decay is a non issue but scattering does put some limits (mean free path of a 14 MeV neutron in air is about 140 meters), though if your goal is just to get a signal through a wall you don't need particularly long range.
- yummypaint 5y agoNot great for long distances unfortunately, as your source will always be isotropic. One could also do this with neutrons with either 241am alphas on beryllium modulated electronically, or with d2 beam incident on d2 target, or proton beam on a tritiated titanium foil target. All should allow for faster modulation. The beam based methods also allow for control of the outgoing energy.
- sizzle 5y agoGreat insight for us laymen. Curious, how are you so knowledgeable about such an esoteric topic? are you a nuclear physicist or…?
- xattt 5y agoThey have Q clearance(1), at least. (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29204027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29204027
- gh02t 5y agoI don't want to hate on this research but my first thought was "well duh of course you COULD but why WOULD you?" This is basically just Morse code with a neutron source. That this is possible is obvious to anybody with a passing familiarity with nuclear engineering, but equally clear is the lengthy list of downsides. Just because nobody has done it doesn't make it novel. This is no doubt meant as a proof of concept and an electronically controlled neutron generator would solve some of the problems, but I still can't think of any use for this that isn't better solved some other way.
- bnegreve 5y ago> I still can't think of any use for this that isn't better solved some other way. What about this? "In some safety-critical scenarios, such as concerning the integrity of reactor containments, and metal vaults and bulkheads in maritime structures, it can be important to minimise the number of penetrations made through such metal structures for communications cabling. The use of neutrons for information transmission through such structures could negate the need for such penetrations and is perhaps also relevant to scenarios where limited transmissions are desirable in difficult circumstances, such as for emergency rescue operations."
- tyingq 5y ago0.1 Baud? Hah!
- GekkePrutser 5y agoIt raises the question... Why? It's not practical and very unwelcome for many obvious reasons. Like really in what environment does it make sense to introduce radiation just for the sake of data transfer?
- RosanaAnaDana 5y agoSpace?
- OldHand2018 5y ago“In some safety-critical scenarios, such as concerning the integrity of reactor containments, and metal vaults and bulkheads in maritime structures, it can be important to minimise the number of penetrations made through such metal structures for communications cabling. The use of neutrons for information transmission through such structures could negate the need for such penetrations and is perhaps also relevant to scenarios where limited transmissions are desirable in difficult circumstances, such as for emergency rescue operations.”
- djsbs 5y agoUse a magnet instead then. Flip it over with the pneumatic arm.
- ericpauley 5y agoI don't buy it. Clearly one has to run power to this transmission device. Once you've drilled a single hole for this all it takes is one tiny wire to vastly exceed the data capacity of this system. You could probably even send data at far higher bitrate over the existing power cable itself.
- klyrs 5y ago
- nukenuke 5y agoFor those wondering, will not really work over long distances (> 100 m) since fast neutrons will thermalize quickly in air and other materials. This means they scatter around approaching a random walk and lose energy, which makes the transmission beam harder to detect. This is really mostly feasible for ~single wall transmission.
- mgsouth 5y agoHow far can you go until the losses are over 160 dB? Reason I'm asking is that LTE Cat-M (low-bandwidth IoT) go that low, or lower [0]. GLONAS (GPS) receivers deal with over 180 dB of loss [1]. It depends on the power level in the transmitter, and how well the receiver can lock on to very faint, but expected, patterns in the noise. One of the tricks is to re-transmit, sometimes literally thousands of times. [0] https://www.altair-semi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Coverage-Analysis-of-LTE-CAT-M1-White-Paper.pdf https://www.altair-semi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Cover... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm -- Satellites transmitting +55 dBm, receivers seeing -127 dBm.
- yummypaint 5y agoThe neutrons used here have a maxwellian energy distribution associated with fission. A single bit will contain neutrons with energies from nearly thermal up to a few MeV. These neutrons are not relativistic at all. For reference a 1 MeV neutron travels a meter in about 70 ns. This means the spread in the neutron spectrum and the transmission distance will conspire to place a fundamental limit on the data rate. Can't have neutrons from neighboring bits mixing together too much. This doesn't even include intermediate scattering which will make things harder.
- orbital-decay 5y agoThe paper is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168900221009013 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016890022... Key takeaway here is novel fast neutron generators [1] that are flat and electronically modulated, so they are potentially good for data transmission through metallic vessels (ship hulls for example) that doesn't require vessel penetration and isn't heavily regulated like californium isotopes. The researchers wanted to demonstrate the data transmission in practice, but used a more conventional setup instead (a Cf-252 source mechanically modulated by a HDPE slab). [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6275497 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6275497
- irq 5y ago> electronically modulated Is it really electronic modulation when the modulation is handled by pneumatically moving a polyethylene block? I would call that mechanically modulated. Electronic modulation would be, say, a transistor switching the output on/off.
- orbital-decay 5y ago[1] in the post above links to a different paper (referenced in OP), which describes exactly that. The researchers in the OP used mechanical modulation instead (which is far less interesting)
- hasmanean 5y agoCould they have used a Farnsworth fusor as a neutron source and electrically modulated it at radio frequencies?
- servytor 5y agoI was imagining a Monty Python scene where someone was using two halves of lead, like coconuts, and slamming them repeatedly over the radioactive material.
- Arrath 5y agoShades of the Demon Core.
- _Microft 5y agoThe Demon Core also came to my mind when reading GP's comment. For those unaware, the Demon Core was a piece of radioactive material and received its name after two people died in different accidents while experimenting with it on criticality . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
- Cyder 5y agoneutrino messaging was mentioned in The Hummingbird Project... Good movie
- tantalor 5y agoIt's a smoke signal.
- chaxor 5y agoAs many have pointed out, this doesn't seem practically useful. However, if you add an "i" and flip the "n" and "o" on that messenger particle, I could see it being greatly useful. Neutrino communications could travel into every nook and cranny, very fast and far indeed.
- folli 5y agoThe radiation in the article is modulated by shielding and deshielding the neutron source. How would you modulate a neutrino?
- therein 5y agoThat's the question and precisely what would make it novel and interesting. If you can easily modulate the source of your signal as is the case with the neutron source, it becomes as uninteresting as morse code.
- jjk166 5y agoNeutrino beams are produced by having a muons circulate in an accelerator with long straight sections. As the muons decay, they release neutrinos moving approximately in the same direction the muon was. You modulate the neutrinos by modulating the muon beam. The simplest way to do this is to introduce or take away muons from the beam, but another option is changing their energy. Muons have a half life of approximately 2 microseconds in their inertial reference frame, but from the standpoint of an observer, relativity can make them seem to live much longer. Decrease the energy to the beam energy such that they're moving slower and it is as if their half life decreases, causing them to decay more frequently and thus produce more neutrinos. The real issue is the detection end. Because of how little neutrinos interact with matter, you need a lot of neutrinos to pass through a detector before you can expect to see a signal, and then you need to distinguish that signal from noise.
- mrfusion 5y agoCould we simply use another muon beam as a detector?
- awiesenhofer 5y agoI already have an existing IPoAC/RFC1149 connection, can I run this one simultaneously or would it cause too many drops on the old line?
- jjcm 5y agoThis seems like non-news? They're just using the amplitude of neutron emission to encode data. This isn't unique at all to radioactive decay - they're basically just using AM radio tech over radioactive decay instead of radio waves. It doesn't provide any benefits, it's more just a "neat!" thing.
- bricss 5y ago252G?
- lucb1e 5y agoThat sounded a lot like U-235 or U-238 (I only know that because of Dan Brown's book where "the difference is three", for those that get that reference, so that's like my level of physics understanding right there). Not sure how to get to Californium's radioactive, um, configurations, I typed U-235 into Wikipedia, found a link to "isotopes of" which listed all of Uranium's, then near the bottom was a handy table with all the "isotopes of" links to other elements, Californium's code is apparently Cf so I found the right link and... 252 has a note saying "most common"! I think I get your reference :D but also, while typing this I realized I probably took the long way of getting there... indeed, re-opening the article, it's also right there, heh.
- kazinator 5y agoThat could be a fun activity for Boy Scouts; one boy, standing outside of the concrete shed, is watching a geiger counter, and the other sends Morse Code by moving a leaden lid up and down on a sample of Plutonium.
- laurent92 5y agoThere was a nuclear badge in the boys scouts, and one kid actually got it, to the dismay of his mother. More generally, had nuclear not been demonized as part of the fear of mutual destruction ideology (I’m not saying it was wrong), maybe we would have lived in a parallel world where tinkering with radioactive elements would have been more widespread, and innovation wouldn’t have stalled for 60 years. Maybe we’d have a lot of nuclear-in-a-box batteries by now.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
- Ekaros 5y agoNow I actually wonder how to do it over a wire. That is use nuclear radiation to transfer data...
- kazinator 5y agoSpeaking of mechanical devices to selectively obstruct radiation ... I had a manager who is a clever fellow. He used some construction toy with electrical motor abilities to rig together a test apparatus whereby a mobile device was placed into a steel cooking skillet, and the apparatus was periodically lifting the lid. This caused the device to go into and out of mobile coverage, allowing for testing of in-and-out-of-coverage transitions, and reproducing problems reported with respect to them.
- MobiusHorizons 5y agoDon’t high velocity neutrons irradiate the materials they go through? I would imagine this could lead to interference in long lived installations. Also how would this be safe in a maritime environment?
- foxes 5y agoIs this really a good idea? Also reminds me that neutrons will degrade a material over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_embrittlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_embrittlement
- p1mrx 5y agoThis sounds like something Cave Johnson would do. "Science isn't about 'Why?', it's about 'Why not?'"
- yalogin 5y agoSo we can be assured of internet coverage even in the case of a nuclear holocaust? Google and Facebook are launching the balloon based service and selling ads tomorrow :) On a serious note what can the practical implications be to f this?
- spikels 5y agoImagine a neutrino based communication system. It could always take the shortest route: a straight line thru anything, the earth for example. No connections but probably huge transmitters and receivers. https://cerncourier.com/a/long-distance-neutrinos/ https://cerncourier.com/a/long-distance-neutrinos/
- News-Dog 5y agoElectrostatic positional modulation of a heavy water droplet ultrasonic suspended over the aperture of the radiation source?