It's safe to say that a whole lot more of the world knows what a neutrino is — or at least that it exists — than just a year ago. Thank IceCube, the somewhat high profile neutrino detection experiment in Antarctica, and, most especially, the highly publicized results released last fall claiming that neutrinos are violating nature's speed limit, aka light. As expected, those results are looking like a measurement error, but don't be disappointed in our mysterious little neutrino buds: they might just represent a revolution in reaching out and touching someone.Like radio waves, our usual method of getting information around the globe (and beyond), neutrinos can encode a message. What that means is the potential to communicate between any two points on the globe without satellites or relays, point-to-point, like a pigeon that can sail through rock unencumbered at the speed of light. Researchers at Fermilab have for the first time done this successfully, according to a new paper posted to the arVix pre-print server.First, let's refresh. Neutrinos are fairly mysterious particles that don't interact with much of anything in the universe. They have, for all practical purproses, zero mass so they travel at the speed of light (for all practical purposes). It is a rather energy-consuming task to produce them in a sufficient beam to communicate a message with, as well as build a detector to receive that beam. The Fermilab researchers used an experiment called NuMI to generate the beam, and a massive 179 ton detector called MINERvA (pictured), located in an underground cavern about a kilometer away, to receive it. Relatively speaking, it's tremendously inefficient, detecting less than one percent of the neutrinos sent.That is, however, enough to send a message. The folks at Fermilab sent the word "neutrino," which took over two hours. So the technology to do this is still very limited. Technology Review likens the transmission to the first telephone call in 1876, something of a proof of the technology. (And imagine if there's something to faster-than-light neutrinos — phone calls to the past.)"The biggest challenges are the extreme difficulty of creating and pointing the beams, and the massive detectors required," the paper's lead author, Dan Stancil, tells Motherboard. "For this reason, I think neutrino systems will be limited to niche applications, barring an unforeseen breakthrough. However, I think there may be certain strategic uses where the cost and complexity may be worth it." For example, sending messages underwater to submarines, or to spacecraft orbiting distant planets (and thus blocked from radio communications during a large part of their missions.)One of those strategic uses also might be secure communications. Because neutrinos are fired in a beam underground, it would be extremely hard to intercept the message. You'd have to bore a hole under the detector or sender in exact alignment and, even, then the reciever would know right away about the interception and so the whole apparatus could be adjusted. "Such a link would not be intrinsically secure like quantum encryption," Stancil says. "But it would be practically secure for [those reasons]. The only ways to intercept would be to construct an eavesdropping detector within a few kilometers of the intended detector, or to orbit an extraordinarily massive detector. It would be very difficult to do either of these without being detected."Connections:
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