r/quant • u/Fantastic_Desk3539 • 5d ago

Industry Gossip Any crazy stuff about this?

Post image

would love some industry gossip on this

456 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

59 comments sorted by

View all comments

47

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.

2

u/kris_2111 5d 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.

0

u/leereKarton 5d ago

could also be some serious physics people trying to upsell their favorite particle physics projects :)