Jacob Aron, reporter
(Image: Fermilab Visual Media Services)
Just as neutrinos look likely to lose their faster-than-light crown, these subatomic particles have a new claim to fame as part of a wireless communication system that could potentially send messages directly through the Earth's core.
A team at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois have successfully used a beam of the near-massless particles to transmit the word "neutrino" to a detector 1 km away, including a 240-metre journey through solid rock.
Neutrinos rarely interact with other forms of matter, so pass through most objects unimpeded - including the Earth's core. That makes them potentially useful as messengers. Previous suggestions include using these ghostly particles to send messages across the planet without wires, cables or satellites, to communicate with hidden submarines or even to sync alien clocks. This latest experiment is the first demonstration that the principle actually works.
The researchers used Fermilab's Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam to fire pulses containing trillions of neutrinos at the MINERvA detector, which is underground so as to shield it from cosmic rays, charged particles that rain down on Earth from space.?The team encoded the word "neutrino" using a standard binary communications code that turns letters into strings of zeros and ones. These binary digits were transmitted using the presence of a pulse to stand for "1" and the absence to stand for "0".
The one-word message consisted of 25 pulses separated by a space of just over two seconds and was repeated around 3500 times over a span of 142 minutes, with an average of just 0.81 neutrinos detected for each pulse. That corresponds to a transmission rate of 0.1 bits per second, with an error rate of 1 per cent. The team have submitted their results to the journal Modern Physics Letters A.
Don't expect to check your email via neutrinos any time soon, however, as the researchers say much more work is needed before widespread neutrino communication could truly be practical.
Even a very low-bandwidth system might be useful for exchanging encryption keys though. These could then be used by two parties on opposite sides of the planet to communicate securely through more conventional means. Because neutrinos require specialised equipment to detect, and travel in a straight, focussed beam - unlike radio waves, say, which spread out - they should be pretty secure.
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