Researchers at Harvard and UW-Madison are designing a…
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Researchers at Harvard and UW-Madison are designing a detector to receive data sent straight through the Earth using neutrinos, removing the need for undersea cables and creating networks no natural disaster can disrupt
Our global communications network depends on infrastructure (undersea cables, communication towers) that is vulnerable during natural disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes. A volcanic eruption severed Tonga's fiber connection in 2022 leaving the country without internet access for five weeks. An earthquake in 2006 near Taiwan cut multiple cables and disrupted connectivity across East Asia for weeks. Neutrino communication would not suffer from these issues because neutrinos travel in a straight line through solid rock without requiring any cables. Also, a direct path through the Earth is shorter than any surface route, which matters for latency-sensitive applications like remote surgery where surgeons lose precision as delay increases.
The physics behind it is straightforward since neutrinos pass through solid rock without interacting, so they can travel in a straight line where electromagnetic signals cannot. This was demonstrated in 2012 when a team at Fermilab encoded the word "Neutrino" and sent it through 240 meters of rock. It worked, though the data rate came in at roughly 0.1 bits per second, so the concept held up even as the throughput was nowhere near usable.
The detection side has changed significantly since then. TeV-scale neutrinos interact roughly a thousand times more frequently than the GeV neutrinos used at Fermilab, which means detectors can be far smaller. In 2023, FASER and SND@LHC at the Large Hadron Collider detected collider neutrinos for the first time, confirming that higher-energy beams can be captured with compact hardware.
Researchers at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are now designing a surface detector called SINE that would sit about 18 kilometers from the LHC. Instead of catching neutrinos directly, it tags the muons that neutrinos produce when they interact in rock upstream. The detector fits inside standard cargo containers lined with scintillator panels and uses the surrounding Jura mountains as natural shielding against cosmic ray noise. If a neutrino receiver can be built from off-the-shelf scintillator panels and fit inside a shipping container, scaling it up or relocating it stops being a hard engineering problem.
#technology
Our global communications network depends on infrastructure (undersea cables, communication towers) that is vulnerable during natural disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes. A volcanic eruption severed Tonga's fiber connection in 2022 leaving the country without internet access for five weeks. An earthquake in 2006 near Taiwan cut multiple cables and disrupted connectivity across East Asia for weeks. Neutrino communication would not suffer from these issues because neutrinos travel in a straight line through solid rock without requiring any cables. Also, a direct path through the Earth is shorter than any surface route, which matters for latency-sensitive applications like remote surgery where surgeons lose precision as delay increases.
The physics behind it is straightforward since neutrinos pass through solid rock without interacting, so they can travel in a straight line where electromagnetic signals cannot. This was demonstrated in 2012 when a team at Fermilab encoded the word "Neutrino" and sent it through 240 meters of rock. It worked, though the data rate came in at roughly 0.1 bits per second, so the concept held up even as the throughput was nowhere near usable.
The detection side has changed significantly since then. TeV-scale neutrinos interact roughly a thousand times more frequently than the GeV neutrinos used at Fermilab, which means detectors can be far smaller. In 2023, FASER and SND@LHC at the Large Hadron Collider detected collider neutrinos for the first time, confirming that higher-energy beams can be captured with compact hardware.
Researchers at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are now designing a surface detector called SINE that would sit about 18 kilometers from the LHC. Instead of catching neutrinos directly, it tags the muons that neutrinos produce when they interact in rock upstream. The detector fits inside standard cargo containers lined with scintillator panels and uses the surrounding Jura mountains as natural shielding against cosmic ray noise. If a neutrino receiver can be built from off-the-shelf scintillator panels and fit inside a shipping container, scaling it up or relocating it stops being a hard engineering problem.
#technology
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