On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 7:11 PM, Marshall Eubanks <marshall.eubanks@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:14 PM, <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:
On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:16:59 -0700, George Herbert said:
The physics is not conducive to improving the situation a lot.
There's probably $1.5 billion in the ground already in neutrino detectors; the total combined detector bit rate is pretty poor. One experiment looking at neutrinos coming off the Fermilab accelerator had 473 million accelerator pulses with under 1.1 million detected neutrinos.
Note that each pulse was probably millions or even billions of neutrinos, so the detection rate was even worse than you'd think. I saw a statistic that every second, 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body. And the number that will interact is well into the single digits.
Small detection numbers are not, per se, fatal to communication. What fraction of the photons generated by a GPS satellite are captured by your phone?
Much higher fraction than with neutrinos. Remember their MFPs are measured in light-years...
The neutrino interaction rate increases with neutrino energy, and sea water makes a good neutrino detector. You could, for a billion dollars, do a LOT better than they did.
On the detector end, sure. On the transmitter end, it's just not a well collimated beam due to physics, and no matter how hard you try the generation of neutrinos is a low-efficiency process.
By the way, here is the original paper : http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.2847v1.pdf
Yep. I meant to include the URL but forgot. -- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com