Neutrino to be adapted for submarine communications
06.10.2009 Patrick Guber from University of Virginia, Institute of Technology proposed to use neutrino for simplex communication with nuclear submarines. Research paper has not been published yet and its preprint is available on arXiv.org.
It is known that neutrinos quite weakly react with substance. On one side that is an advantage, since substantial barriers, like ocean depth, are not obstacles for them. On the other side, signal recording procedure becomes extremely complicated. Example, during reaction of neutrinos with common substance the muons, short-living elementary particles appear. They are exactly what physicists naturally register.
To perform communication, Guber proposes to use high intensity neutrino beam. This beam is supposed to direct on the area where submarine is. Consequently, in that area will appear muons which are to be registered by on-board detectors of the submarine (actually, all submarine's hull is proposed to turn into giant detector). Besides, it is supposed to observe Cherenkov-Vavilov effect caused by muons.
Currently, low frequency electromagnetic pulse is used for communication with submerging submarines. Meanwhile, data transfer rate makes not more than 100 bps when using special antenna emerging on shallow depth. Neutrino communication, as for Guber's estimation, may also provide same data transfer rate without antennas.
There are lots of barriers on the way of the technology practical implementation. For instance, one of the most world's intensive neutrino emitters is located at Fermi Laboratory in the US. This emitter is sending a beam to neutrino detector at the distance of 5 000 km from laboratory for recent two years. At this time about 730 muons have been registered. It means that using this kind of emitter data transfer rate would make about 1 bit per day. Therefore, for practical implementation significantly intensive emitters are essential.
Another restriction of proposed technology is the fact that the communication would be simplex. Besides, to receive signal, the submarine should be in certain area in certain time.