Referring to this article, where we see there are three flavors of neutrinos, got me thinking of simple binary-based communication, but more like the UDP protocol where we can live with dropped packets.
The dropped packets in this case would be when the neutrino changes types or flavors, or not detected. I'm not sure if the loss or change would be within an acceptable range, but it got me thinking.
If they can detect a transmitted neutrino hundreds of miles away without an actual conduit (cables, wires, EM tunnel), could a communication system not be derived out of this?
It is understood that with today's technology, detectors are large, expensive, and only detect some of the neutrinos. But in theory, is this not possible, and if so, how?
Answer
It's possible to detect neutrinos in whichever flavor they are oscillating through, so that won't necessarily cause a "dropped packet" problem.
The answer is, technically, yes, there is no physical law preventing the use of neutrinos as a communication medium. It has been demonstrated that we can cause the emission and detection of neutrinos. For example, neutrino emissions have been detected from a nuclear reactor at a distance of 1 km in this paper.
However, it really can't be overstated just how difficult it is to detect neutrinos. It's really, really difficult. As in, subterranean-cavern-sized-detector level of difficulty. The cross section that neutrinos have with the type of matter we have access to is vanishingly small. It would be an astonishingly expensive, inconvenient, and inefficient method of communication.
No comments:
Post a Comment