It's the Talk of the Planet

[beamjockey]

I had no idea this was going on, almost literally right under my nose.



Experimenters at Fermilab have used the NUMI beam and the MINERνA detector to transmit a message through hundreds of meters of rock.

Account at the Symmetry Breaking blog. University of Rochester press release.

The paper: D. D. Stancil and a great many collaborators, "Demonstration of Communication using Neutrinos," submitted to Modern Physics Letters A. Its abstract:

Beams of neutrinos have been proposed as a vehicle for communications under unusual circumstances, such as direct point-to-point global communication, communication with submarines, secure communications and interstellar communication. We report on the performance of a low-rate communications link established using the NuMI beam line and the MINERvA detector at Fermilab. The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth.

This notion has been kicking around for a while. Robert Perry wrote about the prospect of neutrino communications in Popular Mechanics in September 1978-- the same month Fermilab was hiring me to work in the Neutrino Department as an engineering physicist. It's nostalgic to see pictures of the place as it was in the Seventies. I learned a lot about how to make neutrinos, but never managed to communicate using them.

Mr. Perry interviewed physicists who were optimistic, nearly to the point of delusion, about the idea. (They were also getting grants from the U.S. Navy to study neutrino communication with submarines, so I suppose they had a professional reason to keep up the appearance of optimism.)

It took a long time before this was accomplished, and it may still not be very practical, but nevertheless I salute the neutrino talkers of MINERνA.

Comments

[seawasp]

And when those neutrinos are accelerated to faster than light, we can send each other the lottery numbers IN THE PAST!!!

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Thus accumulating enough money to build the accelerator, the neutrino beam, and the detector!

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Faster than light, yet slower than dialup!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Of course what I wanted to know was what the message was. It appears to have just been repetitions of "neutrino neutrino neutrino" in a 5-bit code.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I was hoping for "WHAT HATH PAULI WROUGHT?" but you can't have everything.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

+1

[quadong.livejournal.com]

I saw the MINOS internal note on this back in July 2010. I wonder why it took them so long to write it up. (I suppose I could ask Phil.)

I have the same reaction to it now as I did then. Since each beam pulse causes about 30 muons to be detected in MINERvA and the MINOS near detector, every time there is or is not a pulse during ordinary running conditions, we've been communicating with neutrinos, and so have many experiments going back a long time. The only difference I can see is that our "message" is usually something to the effect of "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!", where the space in middle is when a pulse didn't hit the target due to some problem.

So I'm not sure what has been gained by actually stuttering the beam in such a way as to send a message as compared with just knowing that obviously you could do that. Perhaps there was a technical challenge in setting up the Main Injector to deliver pulses in such a sequence?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

You pose a good question.

Perhaps it's just a matter of actually doing something that has often been proposed, but never accomplished. There was no great cost involved and, if I understand correctly, it scarcely interfered with MINERνA's normal data-taking. But yeah, it's not astonishing to learn that it can be done.

[planettom.livejournal.com]

The Mole People would like a word. They say cut it out!

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

... You can get a 350' drop in 500 yards in West Chicago?

(Physics stuff v. cool, but way out of my expertise.)

-Nameseeker

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

It helps if you know someone with a very big tunnelling machine.

Also, you will be pumping massive amounts of water out of there for the rest of your life.

Here's a diagram.

I myself was among the First Men Into MINOS when the neutrino beam started up. As Radiation Safety guys, we made measurements to establish that those sections of tunnel which were allegedly safe to work in, when the beam was on, really were safe to work in when the beam was on. After that measurement, it was okay to allow everybody else to work down there.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Yes, a big tunnelling machine would, indeed, help. Thanks for easing my bogglement!

-Nameseeker

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

... and that is a Very Big Tunnel.

-N