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Comment by jxcl | Hacker News Reader

> More feasible

If they don't interact with the thousands of miles of earth between the source and the destination, they probably also won't interact with the receiver! :p Imagine the retransmission rates!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector

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The MINERvA experiment at Fermilab already demonstrated communication with neutrinos, admittedly over short distance: "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."

https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847

Anyone from an HFT firm who wants to look into a partnership researching a neutrino link to the CME data center feel free to reach out :)

There has been a lot of progress in the past 20 years on antineutrino detection. Antineutrinos are produced by fission and so there's been a fair bit of interest in detecting them to detect covert nuclear tests as well as potentially a new modality of detecting nuclear submarines.

I think it could become possible before too long to use this to transmit data. It would probably be a ~billion dollar project, but the HFT arbitrage market is essentially winner-take-all, and may be large enough to support this size investment.

And you'd also have to ignore all the insane amounts of noise coming from regular neutrinos wizzing about in the universe.

If you've built a reliable detector, you've already built something that can intercept them. You just need to make a shroud around your detector and a tube facing your transmitter out of the same material.

There are ~65,000,000,000 neutrinos from the sun passing through each square centimeter of your hands every second as you read this. There are no materials on Earth that can reliably stop any given neutrino. For that, one needs densities greater than those generally found in stellar cores.

Neutrino detectors work by maximizing dumb luck through being both very large and very, very clean (low radioactivity). The transmitter-detector systems work by sending oodles of very energetic neutrinos at a well-defined time and looking for a rare coincident flash in the detector.

Any detector useful for communication is also an interceptor. The way we detect neutrinos now is not useful for communication.

If you're sending neutrinos at a known energy from a known location and in a narrow time-coincidence window, you can hammer most backgrounds way down.

The low detection rate isn't so terrible either -- one only needs the bits that are detected to be tradably-correct almost-all the time.

The hard part is arranging to make enough money to fund the accelerator and detector.

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