3 ms·

The same problem is faced by optical communication during the day with the sensors exposed to sunlight. SNR can be increased a fair bit with even slight direct

by retrac 5y ago

The same problem is faced by optical communication during the day with the sensors exposed to sunlight. SNR can be increased a fair bit with even slight directionality. If sensitivity of detection is one day high enough, I think it would be theoretically possible to obtain directional information about neutrinos, by building a whole network of sensors and synthesizing an aperture.

tehsauce 5y ago
I think this would be impossible without truly alien materials.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  Really? Seems like if we were motivated to do it, we could have a network of Earth satellite detectors in ~a century or so.
  - retrac 5y ago
    "If the sensitivity gets high enough" is the big if to my conjecture. We may never be able to detect enough neutrinos to be reliably detect multiple coming from the same source passing through multiple detectors.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    We need to put a few kilotons of extremely pure water (or maybe other transparent substance) into each satellite. Not impossible, but likely this amount of orbital lift capacity is better used for other projects.
CamperBob2 5y ago
For conventional electronic and optical purposes this isn't a huge deal. You "just" modulate the signal to be transmitted onto a fixed-frequency carrier, and have the receiver ignore everything that's not a sideband of that particular carrier frequency. It's one of those cases where "just" really does apply. IR remote controls work this way, using a slow bitstream to key a 40 kHz carrier that drives the IR LED. Scientific applications that need even greater sensitivity can take advantage of the fact that the expected phase of the carrier is known as well as its frequency. Devices called lock-in amplifiers are used to run a wide variety of experiments and processes using that principle. Doing this stuff with neutrinos rather than photons, however, is one of those * * * * * exercises that the textbook authors put in as a joke.

by retrac 5y ago

tehsauce 5y ago

I think this would be impossible without truly alien materials.

wyldfire 5y ago
Really? Seems like if we were motivated to do it, we could have a network of Earth satellite detectors in ~a century or so.
- retrac 5y ago
  "If the sensitivity gets high enough" is the big if to my conjecture. We may never be able to detect enough neutrinos to be reliably detect multiple coming from the same source passing through multiple detectors.
- nine_k 5y ago
  We need to put a few kilotons of extremely pure water (or maybe other transparent substance) into each satellite. Not impossible, but likely this amount of orbital lift capacity is better used for other projects.

CamperBob2 5y ago

For conventional electronic and optical purposes this isn't a huge deal. You "just" modulate the signal to be transmitted onto a fixed-frequency carrier, and have the receiver ignore everything that's not a sideband of that particular carrier frequency. It's one of those cases where "just" really does apply. IR remote controls work this way, using a slow bitstream to key a 40 kHz carrier that drives the IR LED. Scientific applications that need even greater sensitivity can take advantage of the fact that the expected phase of the carrier is known as well as its frequency. Devices called lock-in amplifiers are used to run a wide variety of experiments and processes using that principle. Doing this stuff with neutrinos rather than photons, however, is one of those * * * * * exercises that the textbook authors put in as a joke.