When neutrinos can be captured and emitted with good ability, and they can go through the earth, then how feasible it is to build a data link with them from between let's say Japan and US?
It's not possible today of course, because it would have been done already.
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4646
It's not impossible, but it's kind of absurd. Neutrinos are insanely hard to detect. You need immense detectors, and even you get only a ludicrously tiny fraction of the neutrinos passing through. You'd have to modulate it by turning on and off an immense nuclear power plant, so despite shaving off milliseconds of latency you still wouldn't be able to communicate fast.
There's no reason to expect any of that to become more practical any time soon. Neutrinos are too small, too fast, and too devoid of interaction to manipulate easily.
A particle accelerator would be much more responsive.
The immense detectors on the other side would stay, and you'll need entire minutes just to get a single neutrino anyway (and then, how many do you need to be sure? at least 2, I imagine.)
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.There was a new HN thread about such a beam just an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528970
We'd modulate this high-energy beam. Data bandwidth would likely be quite low, but in terms of latency, it should be the fastest.
A beam directly going through Earth (e.g. from North America to Asia) is definitely going to be faster than optical fibre (or satellite) links that have wrap around the Earth.
I'm assuming neutrinos are sparse in nature, which is 50,000 metric ton pool of water was needed to detect the neutrinos emanating from the sun. But if we artificially create a highly concentrated beam of many many neutrinos, even a 99.99% loss / non-detection rate shouldn't be problem. (Again, bandwidth would be low, but we are aiming to minimize latency.)
Unfortunately, not even then. Nowadays you generally neglect the latency of the physical act of receiving a bit and being sure whether it is a one or a zero because it is such a small amount of time compared to the other characteristics of the journey, but in this case you can't do that. The amount of time it will take to be sure whether it's a 1 or a 0 being sent will be dwarfed by the amount of time it would take to send a conventional TCP packet containing significantly more than one bit.
Note that while we neglect it, it still exists. If you zoom down to a small enough scale, you don't get a pristine series of ones and zeros, but a noisy voltage or light signal, and there can be plenty of attoseconds where the current voltage/light could correspond to either a 0 or a 1 coming in next.
No, that's not the reason. The reason is that they barely interact with anything, including detection equipment.
> even a 99.99% loss / non-detection rate shouldn't be problem.
"Two water-filled detectors of this type (Kamiokande and IMB) recorded a neutrino burst from supernova SN 1987A. Scientists detected 19 neutrinos from an explosion of a star inside the Large Magellanic Cloud – only 19 out of the octo-decillion (10^57) neutrinos emitted by the supernova." (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector)
First, you have to modulate the source in such a way as to encode a message. I think we can rule out things that involve blocking the beam, so you'll have to adjust the generation power. You're gonna need a massively powerful nuclear reactor or particle accelerator or something to be at all possible to notice the message, so it will probably be pretty tough to modulate that much power at a frequency high enough to get any kind of decent data rate.
Then we need a detector. Since the article is about a massive and massively expensive detector being able to create sort of an image of the Sun after multiple years of observation, I'm not optimistic about that side. We can build a detector that can tell if a manmade beam is on or off, eventually. I'm not very optimistic about building a detector sensitive enough to detect subtle variations in the power of the beam. We're gonna have a real tough time getting a decent data rate.
Doesn't make much difference if 1 bit can be transmitted through the earth faster than an electric signal can make it around if the electronic one can send billions of bits in the time the neutrino detector takes to send two.
> To create the neutrino beam, a beam of protons from the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN was directed onto a graphite target. The collisions created particles called pions and kaons, which were fed into a system of two magnetic lenses that focused the particles into a parallel beam in the direction of Gran Sasso. The pions and kaons then decayed into muons and muon neutrinos in a 1-kilometre tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, a block of graphite and metal 18 metres thick absorbed protons as well as pions and kaons that did not decay. Muons were stopped by the rock beyond, but the muon neutrinos remained to streak through the rock on their journey to Italy.
If corporates are literally blowing holes to mountains to get faster and more direct data links between trading places. Then it sounds like just a question of time when the technology matures enough (if it's possible already).
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/message-en....
In short, they were able to achieve about 0.1 bps with hardware that costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
Unreliable communication that gives you an advantage over mere chance 1% of the time can already be advantageous, you'll be right 51% of the time.
The detector here weighs 50,000,000kg, and still like 99.9..% of neutrinos pass though it without being detected - imagine that kind of signal loss in a data link.
This detector does not notice tiny amount of neutrinos produced at particle accelerators. It would have to placed right next to a 4GW nuclear powerplant to detect neurinos at any kind of reasonable rate.
The only man made source of neutrinos you could detect from another continent is a massive thermonuclear blast.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240560141...
So, you're saying there's a chance?
Plus error correction... When you add error correction and consider the number of missed bits and the need to retransmit / keep transmitting, it's probably not possible to realize a latency win here.
So your communication turns into some random string of detections where you never know if the absence of a detection means there was no neutrino, or it was just missed.
Perhaps, but if you consider the probability of missing an individual neutrino your error correcting scheme will have to be either very long or very clever because your odds of collecting the right neutrino at the right time will go down very quickly as the packet gets longer.
On top of that, if you used some kind of pulse scheme (i.e. morse code with neutrinos) it has to be slow enough to be detectable, but fast enough to beat the latency of a cable (let's say 100ms - speed of light + processing and errors) and also fast enough not to use enough power as to be unprofitable.
Isn't that what I wrote:
> > it's probably not possible to realize a latency win here
?
> On top of that, if you used some kind of pulse scheme (i.e. morse code with neutrinos) it has to be slow
"slow pulse" == long pulse. It will be "fast" in that it will go faster than the speed of light in fiberoptics and the path will be shorter, but it will be slower because error correction will demand a great deal of redundancy which, among other things, means long pulses.
I think we're in agreement.