$1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Tokyo latency by 60ms

Sat Mar 24 02:11:01 UTC 2012

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:14 PM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:16:59 -0700, George Herbert said:
>> The physics is not conducive to improving the situation a lot.
>>
>> There's probably $1.5 billion in the ground already in neutrino
>> detectors; the total combined detector bit rate is pretty poor.  One
>> experiment looking at neutrinos coming off the Fermilab accelerator
>> had 473 million accelerator pulses with under 1.1 million detected
>> neutrinos.
>
> Note that each pulse was probably millions or even billions of neutrinos, so
> the detection rate was even worse than you'd think.  I saw a statistic that
> every second, 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body.  And the number
> that will interact is well into the single digits.
>

Small detection numbers are not, per se, fatal to communication. What
fraction of the photons generated by a GPS satellite are captured by
your phone?

The neutrino interaction rate increases with neutrino energy, and sea
water makes a good neutrino detector. You could, for a billion
dollars, do
a LOT better than they did.

By the way, here is the original paper : http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.2847v1.pdf

Regards
Marshall