[HN Gopher] Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wire...
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Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly
Author : sizzle
Score : 88 points
Date : 2021-11-12 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lancaster.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lancaster.ac.uk)
| Ekaros wrote:
| Now I actually wonder how to do it over a wire. That is use
| nuclear radiation to transfer data...
| nukenuke wrote:
| For those wondering, will not really work over long distances (>
| 100 m) since fast neutrons will thermalize quickly in air and
| other materials. This means they scatter around approaching a
| random walk and lose energy, which makes the transmission beam
| harder to detect.
|
| This is really mostly feasible for ~single wall transmission.
| mgsouth wrote:
| How far can you go until the losses are over 160 dB? Reason I'm
| asking is that LTE Cat-M (low-bandwidth IoT) go that low, or
| lower [0]. GLONAS (GPS) receivers deal with over 180 dB of loss
| [1]. It depends on the power level in the transmitter, and how
| well the receiver can lock on to very faint, but expected,
| patterns in the noise. One of the tricks is to re-transmit,
| sometimes literally thousands of times.
|
| [0] https://www.altair-semi.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/02/Cover...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm -- Satellites
| transmitting +55 dBm, receivers seeing -127 dBm.
| kazinator wrote:
| That could be a fun activity for Boy Scouts; one boy, standing
| outside of the concrete shed, is watching a geiger counter, and
| the other sends Morse Code by moving a leaden lid up and down on
| a sample of Plutonium.
| laurent92 wrote:
| There was a nuclear badge in the boys scouts, and one kid
| actually got it, to the dismay of his mother.
|
| More generally, had nuclear not been demonized as part of the
| fear of mutual destruction ideology (I'm not saying it was
| wrong), maybe we would have lived in a parallel world where
| tinkering with radioactive elements would have been more
| widespread, and innovation wouldn't have stalled for 60 years.
| Maybe we'd have a lot of nuclear-in-a-box batteries by now.
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
| orbital-decay wrote:
| The paper is here:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016890022...
|
| Key takeaway here is novel fast neutron generators [1] that are
| flat and electronically modulated, so they are potentially good
| for data transmission through metallic vessels (ship hulls for
| example) that doesn't require vessel penetration and isn't
| heavily regulated like californium isotopes.
|
| The researchers wanted to demonstrate the data transmission in
| practice, but used a more conventional setup instead (a Cf-252
| source mechanically modulated by a HDPE slab).
|
| [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6275497
| servytor wrote:
| I was imagining a Monty Python scene where someone was using two
| halves of lead, like coconuts, and slamming them repeatedly over
| the radioactive material.
| Arrath wrote:
| Shades of the Demon Core.
| _Microft wrote:
| The Demon Core also came to my mind when reading GP's
| comment. For those unaware, the Demon Core was a piece of
| radioactive material and received its name after two people
| died in different accidents while experimenting with it on
| criticality .
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
| danbruc wrote:
| In case someone else is wondering, they modulated the neutron
| beam by pneumatically moving a polyethylene block in front of the
| Californium source which sits inside a one cubic meter water tank
| and can be pneumatically moved close to one of the walls for
| activation. The data rate was about one bit every ten seconds.
| version_five wrote:
| At this bitrate, and over short distances - maybe 1m, a
| rotating permanent magnet (or a powerful electromagnet) could
| also be competitive. It wouldn't work for anything with a high
| magnetic permeability (like iron) but for non magnetic metal or
| water a static field would penetrate at least a short distance,
| enough to go through a wall.
|
| (BTW, I've imagined that in the distant future, we'll have
| gravity wave generators and detectors that don't have the same
| constraints as EM based data transmissions. I don't know how
| realistic this is.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Reminds me of that paper I read a long time ago, about how we
| could detect advanced alien civilizations by analysing pulsar
| signals. The hypothesis was that they would put massive
| devices in orbit of pulsars to modulate their high energy
| signals to use as ultra long range communication. Presumably
| pulsars would be the only strong enough carrier wave.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I _was_ wondering, thank you! Surprised the article didn 't
| bother with even a sentence to explain this.
| op00to wrote:
| I figured it was something like a trombone mute. Not sure why
| that was the image I got of how they did it.
| Trias11 wrote:
| Newsomium decay causes Californium to be so radioactive
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait
| comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we
| ban such accounts because we're trying for a different sort of
| discussion here.
|
| I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| bricss wrote:
| 252G?
| Cyder wrote:
| neutrino messaging was mentioned in The Hummingbird Project...
| Good movie
| tantalor wrote:
| It's a smoke signal.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| But won't the range be limited by neutron decay?
| jjk166 wrote:
| Thermal neutrons move at approximately 2000 m/s, with a half
| life of about 612 seconds. Decay is a non issue but scattering
| does put some limits (mean free path of a 14 MeV neutron in air
| is about 140 meters), though if your goal is just to get a
| signal through a wall you don't need particularly long range.
| chaxor wrote:
| As many have pointed out, this doesn't seem practically useful.
| However, if you add an "i" and flip the "n" and "o" on that
| messenger particle, I could see it being greatly useful.
|
| Neutr _ino_ communications could travel into every nook and
| cranny, very fast and far indeed.
| folli wrote:
| The radiation in the article is modulated by shielding and
| deshielding the neutron source. How would you modulate a
| neutrino?
| jjk166 wrote:
| Neutrino beams are produced by having a muons circulate in an
| accelerator with long straight sections. As the muons decay,
| they release neutrinos moving approximately in the same
| direction the muon was. You modulate the neutrinos by
| modulating the muon beam. The simplest way to do this is to
| introduce or take away muons from the beam, but another
| option is changing their energy. Muons have a half life of
| approximately 2 microseconds in their inertial reference
| frame, but from the standpoint of an observer, relativity can
| make them seem to live much longer. Decrease the energy to
| the beam energy such that they're moving slower and it is as
| if their half life decreases, causing them to decay more
| frequently and thus produce more neutrinos.
|
| The real issue is the detection end. Because of how little
| neutrinos interact with matter, you need a lot of neutrinos
| to pass through a detector before you can expect to see a
| signal, and then you need to distinguish that signal from
| noise.
| bally0241 wrote:
| You don't modulate the neutrino beam itself, but you could
| modulate the pion production beam. For typical neutrino beam
| experiments this is done with a large magnetic horn which
| focuses/defocuses (+/-) charged pions which then decay to
| (anti)neutrinos and (anti)leptons. By changing the current in
| the horn you could modulate the intensity of the beam to send
| data.
|
| Needless to say this is woefully impractical, would require
| an extremely large neutrino flux and detector, and would have
| an absolutely abysmal bit-rate. Not to mention you'd likely
| only be able to send messages in one direction. But it could
| be done.
|
| see: https://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive/archive_2014/toda
| y14-...
| retzkek wrote:
| It was actually demonstrated (over relatively short
| distance) using the MINERvA detector at Fermilab:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847
| therein wrote:
| That's the question and precisely what would make it novel
| and interesting.
|
| If you can easily modulate the source of your signal as is
| the case with the neutron source, it becomes as uninteresting
| as morse code.
| manpagereader wrote:
| Why modulate it at all? Just use CW.
| manpagereader wrote:
| We used to do this by opening a port in the shield over an x-ray
| source and detecting it with the predecessor of digital x-ray
| sensors back in the lab, sending morse code.
| yummypaint wrote:
| Not great for long distances unfortunately, as your source will
| always be isotropic. One could also do this with neutrons with
| either 241am alphas on beryllium modulated electronically, or
| with d2 beam incident on d2 target, or proton beam on a tritiated
| titanium foil target. All should allow for faster modulation. The
| beam based methods also allow for control of the outgoing energy.
| gnufx wrote:
| If you're allowed an accelerator, perhaps something like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISIS_neutron_source if not in a
| confined space.
| trhway wrote:
| >241am alphas on beryllium modulated electronically
|
| sounds like a primitive logic gate to me :) One can imagine a
| self powered logic circuits built along this way.
| gh02t wrote:
| I don't _want_ to hate on this research but my first thought
| was "well duh of course you COULD but why WOULD you?" This is
| basically just Morse code with a neutron source. That this is
| possible is obvious to anybody with a passing familiarity with
| nuclear engineering, but equally clear is the lengthy list of
| downsides. Just because nobody has done it doesn't make it
| novel.
|
| This is no doubt meant as a proof of concept and an
| electronically controlled neutron generator would solve some of
| the problems, but I still can't think of any use for this that
| isn't better solved some other way.
| bnegreve wrote:
| > I still can't think of any use for this that isn't better
| solved some other way.
|
| What about this?
|
| "In some safety-critical scenarios, such as concerning the
| integrity of reactor containments, and metal vaults and
| bulkheads in maritime structures, it can be important to
| minimise the number of penetrations made through such metal
| structures for communications cabling. The use of neutrons
| for information transmission through such structures could
| negate the need for such penetrations and is perhaps also
| relevant to scenarios where limited transmissions are
| desirable in difficult circumstances, such as for emergency
| rescue operations."
| smartscience wrote:
| That's still more than a bit of a stretch considering the
| drawbacks, such as making that vault or bulkhead material
| radioactive even after the neutron beam has been shut off.
| In practice the duraction of the induced radioactivity
| varies considerably depending on the material; just hope
| it's not an alloy that includes cobalt.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Well what about mechanical waves /sound waves. I mean we
| are talking about rates of less than a bit per second. Just
| have a small hammer ping your metal container. Will go much
| further is much cheaper and can easily do a higher data
| rate.
| titanomachy wrote:
| More moving parts than an electrically-modulated neutron
| source. But this was my first thought as well.
| sizzle wrote:
| Great insight for us laymen. Curious, how are you so
| knowledgeable about such an esoteric topic? are you a nuclear
| physicist or...?
| xattt wrote:
| They have Q clearance(1), at least.
|
| (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29204027
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| I already have an existing IPoAC/RFC1149 connection, can I run
| this one simultaneously or would it cause too many drops on the
| old line?
| kazinator wrote:
| Speaking of mechanical devices to selectively obstruct radiation
| ...
|
| I had a manager who is a clever fellow. He used some construction
| toy with electrical motor abilities to rig together a test
| apparatus whereby a mobile device was placed into a steel cooking
| skillet, and the apparatus was periodically lifting the lid.
|
| This caused the device to go into and out of mobile coverage,
| allowing for testing of in-and-out-of-coverage transitions, and
| reproducing problems reported with respect to them.
| jjcm wrote:
| This seems like non-news? They're just using the amplitude of
| neutron emission to encode data. This isn't unique at all to
| radioactive decay - they're basically just using AM radio tech
| over radioactive decay instead of radio waves. It doesn't provide
| any benefits, it's more just a "neat!" thing.
| rbanffy wrote:
| In essence, they have invented the cellphone that actually causes
| cancer ;-)
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| I've heard there's a lot of prior art.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Neutron bombardment is unhealthy, but it was never used for
| communication until now.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| I mean about a cell phone that causes cancer, it's too late
| to patent that.
| raldi wrote:
| The article doesn't state what distance they were able to
| transmit over.
| java-man wrote:
| During the Cold War, I've heard rumors of one directional
| communication system with submarines using neutrinos.
|
| I don't know what the utility of the system described in the
| article though - neutrons will be absorbed pretty quickly, so
| the communication must have a very short range.
| perihelions wrote:
| How could a _nuclear-powered_ submarine possibly host a
| neutrino detector? You 're sitting meters away from one of
| the brightest neutrino sources on the planet!
| java-man wrote:
| please see my comment below in this thread.
| djsbs wrote:
| "... using neutrinos"
|
| "... neutrons will be absorbed..."
|
| I made the same confusion for a second. Neutrons are easily
| absorbed. Neutrinos (little neutrons) are almost impossible
| to interact with (and therefore absorb)
| ed wrote:
| It takes something like 18 light years of lead to attenuate a
| neutrino beam by half, so they'd need a pretty big receiver
| :)
| Accujack wrote:
| It's possible to detect neutrinos with a scintillation
| chamber, but in general only a tiny fraction of neutrinos
| passing through would be observed. They really don't
| interact with regular matter much.
|
| However, it's the transmitter that would be nearly
| impossible, because blocking neutrinos or affecting them in
| such a way as to modulate the beam would be extremely
| difficult.
|
| I think we can probably rule out neutrino based
| communications during the cold war, especially since VLF
| did the job just fine.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Modulating neutrinos is easy. You just control the
| production rate. For example ramping a fission reactor up
| and down will create pulses of neutrinos (though it's not
| terribly efficient). For practical neutrino
| communications, you'd want to use a muon beam to generate
| your neutrinos. The neutrinos are emitted roughly in the
| same direction the muons were moving when they decay, so
| you can make a directional beam, and by controlling the
| number of muons decaying at any given point in time,
| either by directly controlling the number of muons or how
| much time dilation they experience in the beam, you can
| ramp up and down neutrino production.
| java-man wrote:
| The "rumor" referred to an array of scintillators dragged
| behid the submarine, with the ocean water as a detecting
| medium. In theory, with clear enough water and large
| enough detector volume, that idea might work. I vaguely
| recall data rate of less than one bit per second.
| ISL wrote:
| The data-rate would be far below 1 bps. The event-rate in
| SuperK [1] from the _Sun_ was ~0.1 /day/kiloton of water.
|
| Signalling to submarines would require a Fermilab or
| T2K-caliber accelerator with an ability to direct a beam,
| with a properly-oriented pion-decay hall, generally in
| the known direction of the submarine _and_ highly-
| synchronized clocks (or a clever time-structure strategy)
| to allow coincidence-detection for background-
| suppression.
|
| For scale, the MINOS detector [2] detected a couple
| thousand events with a couple of years of beam-time.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-
| Kamiokande#/media/File:N...
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.0340.pdf
| extrapickles wrote:
| That sounds a lot like the ELF radio system they used,
| which basically was used to order submarines to surface
| (or near enough) to receive new orders as the bandwidth
| was <1 baud.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency
| bostonsre wrote:
| Yea, I'm curious about this as well and what bit rate they were
| able to achieve. Wondering if it could be used for high
| frequency trading in the future since I would think neutrons
| going straight from source to destination would be faster than
| any other communication method (no idea if this would be too
| dangerous or not tho).
| djsbs wrote:
| With neutrons, no. They're slow, isotropic and thermalize
| easily.
|
| With neutrinos that'd be a different story. They travel at
| the speed of light (or just below it - depends who you ask)
| and they aren't readily absorbed by anything. Therefore they
| can travel through the earth instead of around it.
|
| Problem?
|
| Generation, modulation and detection of neutrinos.
| gnufx wrote:
| > They're slow, isotropic
|
| Not necessarily, if produced with an accelerator.
| (Potentially a nuisance to gamma-ray spectroscopists,
| generating spurious anisotropic scattering peaks.)
| Otherwise, yes.
| darig wrote:
| 1 bit every 10 seconds would never be used for HFT
| [deleted]
| sobellian wrote:
| I would be very surprised if neutrons travel faster than a
| microwave beam.
| xvedejas wrote:
| Radio waves already travel at the speed of light, I'm curious
| what speed-up you're imagining? A shortcut through the earth
| is the only option I can think of to beat radio's latency.
| tyingq wrote:
| 0.1 Baud? Hah!
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29203516.)
| tyingq wrote:
| Got it, though it wasn't meant as a dismissal...just
| surprise.
| [deleted]
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| It raises the question... Why? It's not practical and very
| unwelcome for many obvious reasons. Like really in what
| environment does it make sense to introduce radiation just for
| the sake of data transfer?
| pm90 wrote:
| Just because it doesn't have any immediate applications right
| now doesn't mean it won't in the future.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Space?
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| "In some safety-critical scenarios, such as concerning the
| integrity of reactor containments, and metal vaults and
| bulkheads in maritime structures, it can be important to
| minimise the number of penetrations made through such metal
| structures for communications cabling. The use of neutrons
| for information transmission through such structures could
| negate the need for such penetrations and is perhaps also
| relevant to scenarios where limited transmissions are
| desirable in difficult circumstances, such as for emergency
| rescue operations."
| ericpauley wrote:
| I don't buy it. Clearly one has to run power to this
| transmission device. Once you've drilled a single hole for
| this all it takes is one tiny wire to vastly exceed the
| data capacity of this system. You could probably even send
| data at far higher bitrate over the existing power cable
| itself.
| jjk166 wrote:
| You don't need to penetrate the wall if you have power
| sources on both sides of the wall.
| klyrs wrote:
| Why is that obvious? Couldn't they use an RTG to power
| the device without the need for a wire?
|
| Though... it does seem like a piezoelectric transducer,
| or even a relay, could transmit an audio signal through a
| solid metal bulkhead much more efficiently.
| djsbs wrote:
| Use a magnet instead then. Flip it over with the pneumatic
| arm.
| 27182818284 wrote:
| The first trans-atlantic telegraph message took 16 hours to
| send.
| pishpash wrote:
| Probably military applications too if it evades conventional
| detection.
| sizzle wrote:
| There can be many innovative use cases in industry or
| military applications where wires cannot penetrate the
| surface of an object and other signals are too weak to
| penetrate the object to transmit data about something mission
| critical.
|
| This warrants future investigation at the very least, however
| impractical it may be. Quantum computers may also benefit
| from this technology, etc.
| tyingq wrote:
| It would be interesting to see what places some other
| alternative like sound, light, laser, VLF, etc, aren't
| viable options.
| djsbs wrote:
| You're basically right.
|
| Miners trapped in a cave not penetrated by E&M waves?
|
| Wont work.
|
| Signal from inside a reactor?
|
| No. No logic can modulate the signal in said reactor that
| isn't destroyed by the radiation.
|
| If you have a pneumatic arm to modulate this thing, use it to
| flip a magnet. That'll better penetrate any shield than
| neutrons.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Why wouldn't it work for the miners or the reactor?
|
| Neutrons pass through rock quite well.
|
| Reactors are basically just giant neutron transmitters, by
| modulating reactor output you also modulate their neutron
| output.
|
| Flipping a magnet definitely won't penetrate a shield
| better than neutrons, in fact because of Gauss' law it
| probably won't penetrate at all.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I believe the theoretical throughput of a modulated neutrons
| is _very_ _very_ high - substantially higher than the
| electromagnetic waves we send today.
|
| Given that, perhaps the people of 1000 years from now will be
| using them to do data transfer because electromagnetic waves
| are far too primitive and low bandwidth.
| gnufx wrote:
| On the basis of what physics?
| jfoutz wrote:
| I like to point at the signal fire in lord of the rings.
| Absurdly elaborate communication system that can only one shot
| a single bit. But it's far far faster than any alternative. And
| if both sides understand the meaning of the message, it could
| be worth it.
|
| I could see a regular pulse being a useful monitoring system
| for (whatever they care about). no pulse, send help.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Although the beacon system (technically a form of semaphore)
| could likely have been much better optimized.
|
| For example, if a single pyre went unattended or was
| otherwise unable to light their fire (for example say an orc
| band attacked it), the whole system would fail, and there
| would be no way of knowing that it had failed. Consider also
| the possibility that one of the teams may have been able to
| light their fire, but for fear of drawing enemy attention to
| themselves, choose not to. Same effect. A more failsafe
| option would be to have the fires constantly burning with the
| light being cut off as the signal bit. This could be
| accomplished quickly and easily by having some shutter that
| drops down and blocks the fire's light. If one of the
| stations were abandoned or damaged, its fire would go out,
| alerting the network that something was amiss. This also
| means that the cowards who don't want to alert orcs to their
| position need only stop tending their station when in danger,
| and they are free to flee.
|
| Of course once you have some shutter in place to quickly
| block out light, you can presumably raise and lower the
| shutter. With an appropriate protocol, you can essentially
| achieve a visual telegraph. If each station maintains two
| fires, you can achieve bi-directional communication. This is
| also good for eliminating false positives for the main alert
| function if one fire just goes out for some reason.
|
| It's interesting that real life semaphore systems like
| Phryctoria or the Byzantine Beacons did not implement fail-
| safe methods.
| spoonjim wrote:
| You don't have to use a fictional example of a signal fire...
| it was used in ancient China to send exactly this message:
| "Send the army"
| FredPret wrote:
| This is probably the tech that drives the Pip-Boy
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