The Spread Networks corporation recently laid down 825 miles of fiberoptic cable between New York and Chicago, stretching across Pennsylvania, for the sole purpose of reducing the latency of microsecond trades to less than 13.33 milliseconds (http://www.spreadnetworks.com/spread-networks/spread-solutions/dark-fiber-networks/overview). The lesson I would draw from this is that, in the near future, oil and natural gas extraction won't be the only lucrative use of ocean platforms.
So here's my question - since trades are occurring on the scale of tens to hundreds of microseconds, and considering the amount of money involved, can one use neutrino beams to beat the limitation due to having to travel the great-circle/orthodromic distance between two trading hubs? I'm imagining something similar to the MINOS detector (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS), where a neutron beam was generated at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and detected ~735 km away, ~700 meters under the ground in a Northern Minnesota mine.
Is it possible to beat a signal traveling at the speed of light across the great-circle distance from, say, New York to Tokyo, using a neutron beam traveling the earth? Is it realistic to talk about generating these beams on a microsecond time-scale?
Addendum - Over what distances can you reasonably detect a neutrino beam?
Answer
Whether or not neutrinos would be suitable for rapid trading, people have seriously considered their utility for signalling in difficult environments. I read an article a while back about a paper (published in Phys. Lett. B, but I can't access that from here) by Patrick Huber which proposed using neutrinos for through-the-earth communication to submarines as an alternative to ELF, where bandwidths become competitive. The submarine would pick up the modulated cherenkov radiation produced by the generation of muons in seawater. This certainly allows faster-than-great-circle transmission times, but this is not the reason why the technique is attractive. The preprint indicates that calculated antipode to antipode bandwidth is only 10 b/s which doesn't seem ready for high-intensity trading.
Addendum:
If we consider a continuous lossless fibre optic link between antipodes around the equator, the transmission time will be about 99 ms, whilst the through-earth travel time (at $\approx{c}$) is 42 ms. Obviously this counts for nothing if you have high-latency equipment at either end.
Whilst the improvement in transmission time hardly seems worth it, it occurs to me that this would be a useful technique for communicating between either side of a huge, highly oblate structure such as a wide but thin disk-shaped megastructure, however that's veering in to sci-fi territory.
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