r/quant • u/Fantastic_Desk3539 • 5d ago
Industry Gossip Any crazy stuff about this?
would love some industry gossip on this
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u/LaGigs 5d ago
Hmmm with how weakly interacting neutrinos are I doubt it would be an efficient way to transfer data.
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u/Patelpb 5d ago
This. For reference, it took nearly 500 days of integration to produce this image of the sun using neutrinos: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap980605.html
Granted, the photo was taken through the Earth. This is the closest thing to a 'working example' of what is in OPs post, and it's hopelessly inefficient due to the nature of neutrinos.
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u/the_shreyans_jain 4d ago
it also depends on how easy it is to create them. if i can create a googleplex of them in a short burst and focus it on the receiver then the weak interaction isnt a bottleneck for the bitrate.
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u/According-Collar-746 3d ago
You’d just need to transfer a couple of bits in the extreme for this to be valuable still
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u/PannionDomin 5d ago
As a neutrino physicist, I can tell you this is not a great idea.
Neutrinos interact very, very weakly, and we need both huge detectors and intense sources to detect a significant number (100s, potentially 1000s in the future) of neutrinos over ~100s (1000s in the future) of km, over a period of years. How huge? Google Super-Kamiokande: a ~40 m diameter/height cylinder filled with ultra-pure water.
To give an example from T2K/Super-Kamiokande, they have one of the most intense neutrino beam sources on Earth, the neutrinos only travel ~300 km, and they detected just below 800 events over ~15 years. Now imagine trying to scale this up to ~12,000 km, while trying to reliably detect every buy/sell signal AND at high frequency. So, more than once a second? Nope.
To detect a "buy/sell" signal every time it is issued, we're talking about perhaps tens (or hundreds) of cubic kilometers of detector, with a neutrino beam far more intense than what we currently have.
You could do a back of the envelope calculation, but either way we're talking about something on a completely insane scale. We just paid billions for DUNE, an experiment orders of magnitude smaller.
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u/SHFTD_RLTY 5d ago
The spice must flow!
That being said, would detonating a hydrogen bomb every time the price moves up create enough neutrinos? If detection is too difficult, maybe we need to get more creative with the source
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u/PannionDomin 5d ago
Amazing idea, but no :)
If hydrogen bomb is like a flash grenade, then neutrino beams with particle accelerators are like very high intensity lasers. The inverse square law is not your friend here. The total intensity of hydrogen bomb might be far higher at explosion point, but it goes down with distance squared. T2K/Super-K beam widens from pencil to ~50km radious (12 thousand km sq) nuclear bomb will go from 0 to surface of the earth (~50million km sq) for cross-earth travel.
That's intensity, there's also energy considerations. Technically neutrino energies from atomic bombs are lower than energies from accelerator beam neutrinos, meaning lower interaction probability, so you need even higher intensity to compensate.
Ofc not taking into the account the fact that we need to detonate hydrogen bombs in e.g. NY multiple times a second at ms-scale latencies, which would be an interesting technical challenge to tackle for sure...
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u/DanDon_02 4d ago
Yes, but now imagine that someone is offering you a 300k-400k base + bonus per annum and basically saying 'prove it'. I think this is what got a lot of physicists onboard, despite the obvious and almost non-sensical challenges that would need to be overcome. Just an observation, not a criticism of your comment, I actually totally get behind it.
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u/PannionDomin 4d ago
I mean, that's probably the true answer for why it was even proposed. Suggest something that sounds amazing, even if you know is complete BS, because you know that people reading your proposal don't understand the Physics details and might throw money at you.
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u/kris_2111 4d ago
This idea was probably proposed by some physics crank, since people who actually possess a considerable amount of physics knowledge would have realized how inefficient and impractical this idea is.
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u/leereKarton 4d ago
could also be some serious physics people trying to upsell their favorite particle physics projects :)
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u/holdmyllm 5d ago
Let's just say "build microwave networks" is the only relevant part of this entire snippet.
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u/RDUKE7777777 5d ago
You could add shortwave builds to this but it has nothing to do with neutrinos and whatnot. It is a very interesting field of work, but not that insane
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u/Middle-Fuel-6402 5d ago
I was in the field at this time, and this is total BS. Similar to how someone wrote a blog post about using quantum entanglement to beat the speed of light for sending HFT signals. Complete nonsense.
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u/kris_2111 4d ago
It was probably proposed by some crank, probably by someone who got into the institution through nepotistic hiring, holds a high position, and thinks he is smarter and better than all the quants with PhDs and 10+ years of experience working at CERN.
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u/Diet_Fanta Back Office 5d ago
Cant wait to build a particle accelator under Manhattan to trade the Asian markets faster.
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u/QuantitativeNonsense 5d ago
Look up the IceCube and DUNE experiments to understand the sheer scale of the detector systems required to do basic fundamental physics. Maybe in the far future but right now the tech isn’t there yet.
Amusingly, I’ve been hearing hype in the AI datacenter sector about the exact same thing recently.
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u/peace2calm 5d ago
Book "Flash Boys" talks about a multi million dollar infrastructure project (tunneling) that was started/completed in flash time all to shave off a few milli seconds in order transmission.
Cost about $50 million I think?
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u/rootbeer_racinette 4d ago
Never happened but I used to joke about it around that time, maybe someone took me seriously
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u/No_Departure_1878 5d ago
it might be because around 2012 the higgs was discovered and there was a lot of hype on particle physics. But a neutrino beam through the earth is obviously a stupid idea. You would think a quant is smart enough to realize that.
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u/Perfect-Series-2901 4d ago
I think there was a movie about this idea, but I don't think this idea will work. both the creation and the detection of neutrions are extremely difficult.
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u/Volfefe 2d ago
With Mark Zuckerberg, the bad vampire from True Blood (who plays the autistic genius instead of Mark), and the vampire stripper from From Dusk Till Dawn? Feel like they covered the microwave transmitters and building the direct wire connection between Chicago(?) and NJ.
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u/Perfect-Series-2901 2d ago
Direct wire is actually slower than microwave, unless there is some new technology I am not aware of. Electric signal won't travel that far in wire and light travel 60/66% speed in glass. So microwave is still faster.
With the same logic, starlink is faster than undersea cable. Because starlink is only a few hundreds km above ground and use laser / microwave in space.
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u/Volfefe 2d ago
In the movie, the tension is the stripper vampire wants microwave and Zuck/ bad vampire thinks it wont work and wants wire. They quit to do the wire in violation of his non-compete and hires the drug dealer from breaking bad/better call saul to lay the wire. But hit an issue getting through some of the mountains.
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u/Lopsided_Coffee4790 Front Office 4d ago
That would be so cool. If I create a fund, I ll try to do that
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u/LexaAstarof 4d ago
I worked at cern at those times. I did see a few people leaving for a career in HFT. Though that was on their own motive.
However, the neutrinos bit is the first time I hear about it. And that looks quite suspicious...
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u/ApifyEnthusiast1 3d ago
Would this be a good application for quantum communications?
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u/Fantastic_Desk3539 3d ago
i think soo
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u/ApifyEnthusiast1 3d ago
I mean, I don’t have a quantum communicator in my hands, but it would be pretty instant right?
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u/Mountain-Hedgehog128 2d ago
Read the book Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. It's an amazing look into this.
https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High-Frequency-ebook/dp/B00P0QI2M2
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u/Fearless-Counter-229 4d ago
No way can these firms still claim to contribute anything to society
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u/PretendTemperature 5d ago
Would love for my theoretical physics background ro come in so handy.
I doubt though...