Communication is a very important thing in our life. To communicate with people easily, researchers are trying to bring new ideas and technologies. Messaging is one of the part of communications. A group of scientists along with researchers from the University of Rochester and North Carolina State University have sent a message for the first time using a beam of ‘Neutrinos’. Neutrino is that particle which challenged Einstein’s theory ‘nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, at 180,000 miles per second’ to be wrong. Neutrino particles have the ability to travel at almost the speed of light.
As neutrino can travel very close to the speed of light, so they can pass through substances. Scientists used neutrino to send the message through 240 meters of stone. The team of scientists made a 2 hour test at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab which is outside of Chicago. At Fermilab (short name of Fermi National Accelerator Lab), the researchers had access to 2 crucial components. The first is one of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators, which creates high-intensity beams of neutrinos by accelerating protons around a 2.5 mile circumference track and then colliding them with a carbon target. The second is a multi-ton detector called ‘MINERvA’, located in a cavern 100 meters underground.
“Using neutrinos, it would be possible to communicate between any two points on Earth without using satellites or cables,” said Dan Stancil, professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the research. “Neutrino communication systems would be much more complicated than today’s systems, but may have important strategic uses.”
“Of course, our current technology takes massive amounts of high-tech equipment to communicate a message using neutrinos, so this isn’t practical now,” said Kevin McFarland, a University of Rochester physics professor who was involved in the experiment. “But the first step toward someday using neutrinos for communication in a practical application is a demonstration using today’s technology.”
The message that the scientists sent using neutrinos was translated into binary code. In other words, the word ‘neutrino’ was represented by a series of 1’s(numeric) and 0’s(numeric), where 1’s were encoding to a group of neutrinos and the 0’s were encoding to no neutrinos. The neutrinos were fired in large groups. After the neutrinos were detected, a computer decodes the binary code back into English, and the word ‘neutrino’ was successfully received.
“Neutrinos have been an amazing tool to help us learn about the workings of both the nucleus and the universe,” said Deborah Harris, Minerva project manager, “but neutrino communication has a long way to go before it will be as effective.”
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Source : University of Rochester
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