Imagine being around when the electron was discovered.
Scientists were only beginning to figure out how an electron could be used,
and they certainly couldn't have predicted all the ways we use them today.
>Who cares if electrons can power a street light, I want to share how my cat plays the piano!
>Many of you have asked us what neutrinos can do
or what we could use them for.
That is a great question and it's what we're talking about today on Even Bananas.
[Music]
Neutrinos are still really hard to detect and they require some
enormous advanced detectors, but for a moment let's dream big.
A neutrino's superpower is its ability to pass through solid matter.
That makes it an amazing messenger.
So, you might be able to guess one pie-in-the-sky application for neutrinos: communication.
Imagine trying to get a message from New York to Tokyo. Traditionally, signals would have to travel
through cables along the earth's surface, but neutrinos could happily travel in a straight line
directly through the earth. No tunnel or cable required.
You could even imagine using neutrinos to send messages out into space
without worrying about them being deflected or absorbed by anything along the way.
It's a nice idea but it doesn't really work with today's technology. One of the problems
is that neutrinos rarely interact, and the neutrino beam spreads out as it travels.
That means we can't actually detect enough of them to make them useful for transporting messages.
For example, in the NOvA Experiment at Fermilab,
scientists are sending trillions of neutrinos 500 miles from Fermilab to Minnesota.
And in Minnesota, they see less than one neutrino per day.
So, the neutrinos might get there quickly,
but you'd have to wait a while to receive enough to make out a sentence.
Amazingly, researchers at Fermilab have already successfully sent a short message using neutrinos
through 210 meters of solid rock.
As expected, the neutrinos were fast,
but gathering enough data and decoding the transmission was slow.
It took the 170 ton MINERvA detector about two hours to receive eight letters.
The first word transmitted by neutrinos: "neutrino", of course.
So, it seems like we're a long way off from a neutrino cell phone.
But, what about tackling something a little simpler, like world peace?
Okay, not quite world peace, but close: nuclear non-proliferation.
Nuclear reactors produce a lot of anti-neutrinos and, as we know,
no amount of shielding can stop them.
That means, neutrinos could potentially be used as a tool in nuclear security.
You can imagine using neutrinos to monitor or discover nuclear reactors
or to verify that treaty agreements are being adhered to.
You could potentially keep track of how much uranium or plutonium is present in a reactor
because these different elements produce neutrinos at slightly different energies.
So, neutrinos might warn officials about the illicit production of
plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons.
There are a few different ongoing projects to research using neutrinos for nuclear monitoring,
including a US-UK collaboration called WATCHMEN.
In a similar vein, geologists could use data from geo-neutrinos produced by
radioactive elements inside the earth to better understand what's happening inside our planet.
The KamLAND and Borexino experiments have already done this a bit. They're able to
see neutrinos from uranium and thorium, but not from another major source: potassium.
That would require a different,
more sensitive detector that could capture neutrinos with lower energies.
Those are some pretty cool ideas! But realistically,
we'll be adapting and using the technologies developed to study neutrinos
long before we use the neutrinos themselves for anything practical.
For example, physicists are developing machine learning algorithms to spot neutrinos,
which have applications in other machine vision, like medical imaging.
And the light detection system we use for DUNE has similarities to
the light detection systems being studied for self-driving cars.
Neutrino detectors themselves can also be used to study things beyond neutrinos.
For example, the Ice Cube experiment deep in the ice at the South Pole
has contributed to new discoveries in glaciology.
And researchers showed how they could use the ANTARES neutrino detector in the Mediterranean Sea
to study bioluminescence from deep sea creatures.
I'll put links to lots of information in the description so you can learn more.
It's clear that our understanding of neutrinos is still in its infancy.
Much like those who discovered the electron couldn't foresee how it would change the world,
we don't know where neutrinos will take us.
We do know that they are fascinating particles and one of the best ways to
try to answer some of the biggest questions about our universe.
As for how they change the world, we'll have to wait and see.
What other far-out applications of neutrinos can you think of?
Let us know in the comments, and don't forget to like share and subscribe.
Fun fact: many neutrino detectors built for physics research are
really big and they're often underground to shield them from muons in the atmosphere.
But some of the detectors being developed for nuclear reactor monitoring are a bit different.
These detectors need to get up close to the reactor and move between different sites.
Researchers on experiments like PROSPECT have recently shown success making above-ground
mobile neutrino detectors that can accurately measure neutrinos at commercial reactors.