4 ms·

How Neutrinos Could Revolutionize Communications with Submarines

23 points by TriinT 17y ago

DarkShikari 17y ago
Not just submarines--assuming that the beam can be as focused as necessary, you could even have lightspeed communication with the other side of the world, albeit at a very low bitrate.
- dspeyer 17y ago
  Absolutely. Current latency from New York to Tai Pei is about 210ms. With neutrinos it would be under 80ms. And immune to earthquakes and undersea mudslides. It would also be a lot easier to build emitters and detectors on land than in submarines.
  - duskwuff 17y ago
    But what applications are there for a low-bitrate-low-latency link?
    - DarkShikari 17y ago
      High-frequency trading/arbitrage?
      - duskwuff 17y ago
        Even considering how lucrative HFT can be, I'm not sure it's quite gone to the point that we should be expecting to hear about the Goldman-Sachs Particle Accelerator anytime soon.
- pvg 17y ago
  Focusing a beam of particles that can fly through a planetful of stuff without interacting with anything is a little difficult - the beam is generated in the relevant direction. The NuMI facility that generates the beam mentioned is several hundred meters in length - not something that's easy to point at arbitrary parts of the world.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- idlewords 17y ago
  There was a nice paper a few years back suggesting essentially the same thing as a method for detonating other people's nukes: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062 http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062
jerf 17y ago
That's an awful lot of we're confident this six-orders-of-magnitude problem can be overcome. A six order of magnitude increase in the speed I could wave my hands would be well more than I would need to fly, at least if I could keep my hands from burning up.
dstorrs 17y ago
They kept talking about "3 orders of magnitude" (3 OoM) between ELF (1) and neutrinos (100) which confused me. I had to go back and recheck the units before it made sense. ELF: 1 bit per minute. neutrinos: 100 bits per second. It would have been substantially better to compare them in the same units by saying 6000 bits per minute. Aside from that though...I went to this article all excited. The title seemed to imply that they really had something. Unfortunately, to make it work they need to: 1) Improve their neutrino detection ability by 6 OoM. 2) Either cover the entire hull of the sub in detectors--tricky, since subs are already covered in acoustic tile and the insides are jammed with stuff, making it hard to retrofit the system in--or use Cerenkov light detection, which requires filtering out light from bioluminesce, moonlight, sunlight, etc. 3) Even if all this happens, the submariners can only receive. So this system needs to be in addition to, not in place of, their existing commo, and they still need to come to the (near) surface to transmit. Still, great concept. As other people have commented, would be great to see it used on land.
- wtallis 17y ago
  Presumably, it wouldn't matter which side of the acoustic tiles the neutrino detectors are on. They could really even be on the inside of the hull. The only requirement is to have a large total surface area for the detectors. What I wonder about is interference from the onboard nuclear reactors. Does anybody know how much in the way of neutrinos a typical naval reactor produces? Wikipedia indicates that reactors are typically big producers of anti-neutrinos.
- jedc 17y ago
  I'm a former submarine officer. Submarines are much more concerned about receiving key messages from their commanders than they are about sending messages back. Eliminating trips to periscope depth (the most dangerous activity a submarine does consistently) would be a Very Good Thing.
  - dstorrs 17y ago
    Thank you for straightening me out, jedc. And thank you for your service.
tocomment 17y ago
I always figured SETI should be listening for neutrinos. Perhaps that's how aliens communicate? What would it take to make this a practical method of communication e.g., have a reciever and transmitter in your phone? Would a super dense material work to capture them?
- scotty79 17y ago
  In my opinion that's exactly why SETI has not detected any signal. There is a very low probability that two civilizations will be using radio waves for few exactly same centuries (even taking into account birthday paradox). Civilizations just few hundreds years more advanced than us probably routinely use cheap neutrino based communication channels. Sadly even if we can detect them they will be probably multiplexed, compressed and encrypted so much that without proper (impossible to guess) algorithms they will be indistinguishable from background noise. Looking for radio waves in space and sending them is almost as dumb as making big fire to create huge smoke signals for aliens and using looking glass to spot same kind of messages from aliens in the sky.
  - tocomment 17y ago
    I wonder what other cool Physics phenomenon could be used for advanced message sending? Maybe Aliens communicate through gravity waves?

23 points by TriinT 17y ago

Not just submarines--assuming that the beam can be as focused as necessary, you could even have lightspeed communication with the other side of the world, albeit at a very low bitrate.

dspeyer 17y ago
Absolutely. Current latency from New York to Tai Pei is about 210ms. With neutrinos it would be under 80ms. And immune to earthquakes and undersea mudslides. It would also be a lot easier to build emitters and detectors on land than in submarines.
- duskwuff 17y ago
  But what applications are there for a low-bitrate-low-latency link?
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    High-frequency trading/arbitrage?
    - duskwuff 17y ago
      Even considering how lucrative HFT can be, I'm not sure it's quite gone to the point that we should be expecting to hear about the Goldman-Sachs Particle Accelerator anytime soon.
pvg 17y ago
Focusing a beam of particles that can fly through a planetful of stuff without interacting with anything is a little difficult - the beam is generated in the relevant direction. The NuMI facility that generates the beam mentioned is several hundred meters in length - not something that's easy to point at arbitrary parts of the world.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
idlewords 17y ago
There was a nice paper a few years back suggesting essentially the same thing as a method for detonating other people's nukes: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062 http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062

jerf 17y ago

That's an awful lot of we're confident this six-orders-of-magnitude problem can be overcome. A six order of magnitude increase in the speed I could wave my hands would be well more than I would need to fly, at least if I could keep my hands from burning up.

dstorrs 17y ago

They kept talking about "3 orders of magnitude" (3 OoM) between ELF (1) and neutrinos (100) which confused me. I had to go back and recheck the units before it made sense. ELF: 1 bit per minute. neutrinos: 100 bits per second. It would have been substantially better to compare them in the same units by saying 6000 bits per minute. Aside from that though...I went to this article all excited. The title seemed to imply that they really had something. Unfortunately, to make it work they need to: 1) Improve their neutrino detection ability by 6 OoM. 2) Either cover the entire hull of the sub in detectors--tricky, since subs are already covered in acoustic tile and the insides are jammed with stuff, making it hard to retrofit the system in--or use Cerenkov light detection, which requires filtering out light from bioluminesce, moonlight, sunlight, etc. 3) Even if all this happens, the submariners can only receive. So this system needs to be in addition to, not in place of, their existing commo, and they still need to come to the (near) surface to transmit. Still, great concept. As other people have commented, would be great to see it used on land.

wtallis 17y ago
Presumably, it wouldn't matter which side of the acoustic tiles the neutrino detectors are on. They could really even be on the inside of the hull. The only requirement is to have a large total surface area for the detectors. What I wonder about is interference from the onboard nuclear reactors. Does anybody know how much in the way of neutrinos a typical naval reactor produces? Wikipedia indicates that reactors are typically big producers of anti-neutrinos.
jedc 17y ago
I'm a former submarine officer. Submarines are much more concerned about receiving key messages from their commanders than they are about sending messages back. Eliminating trips to periscope depth (the most dangerous activity a submarine does consistently) would be a Very Good Thing.
- dstorrs 17y ago
  Thank you for straightening me out, jedc. And thank you for your service.

tocomment 17y ago

I always figured SETI should be listening for neutrinos. Perhaps that's how aliens communicate? What would it take to make this a practical method of communication e.g., have a reciever and transmitter in your phone? Would a super dense material work to capture them?

scotty79 17y ago
In my opinion that's exactly why SETI has not detected any signal. There is a very low probability that two civilizations will be using radio waves for few exactly same centuries (even taking into account birthday paradox). Civilizations just few hundreds years more advanced than us probably routinely use cheap neutrino based communication channels. Sadly even if we can detect them they will be probably multiplexed, compressed and encrypted so much that without proper (impossible to guess) algorithms they will be indistinguishable from background noise. Looking for radio waves in space and sending them is almost as dumb as making big fire to create huge smoke signals for aliens and using looking glass to spot same kind of messages from aliens in the sky.
- tocomment 17y ago
  I wonder what other cool Physics phenomenon could be used for advanced message sending? Maybe Aliens communicate through gravity waves?