14 DAY TRIAL // Nuclear-powered submarines can operate underwater, at a depth of around 300 meters (roughly 1,000 feet), for weeks and months on end. While this is of enormous strategic importance, it does come with a drawback, namely the fact that the subs need to come close to the surface in order to communicate with the outside world. When they do that, they are mostly vulnerable to detection and attack. A new type of communication equipment, currently under development, could see submarines talking to each other and with their command centers, by making use of the power of neutrinos.
Neutrinos are small, elementary particles that can travel through ordinary matter just shy of the speed of light. They have a negligible, but non-zero, mass, and they are incredibly hard to detect via conventional methods. These particles do not have any electric charge. Their names literally mean the “small, neutral ones.” According to Technology Review, these particles may hold the key to communicating underwater, where radio waves find it difficult to penetrate to a safe, submarine-operating depth. The only wavelengths capable of penetrating into the deep are extremely low frequency (ELF) waves, which operate at 100 hertz.
However, they are notoriously difficult to produce at high powers, and require a lot of energy, which makes them expensive to utilize. Even if they are employed, they can only transfer one bit of data per minute, which is, of course, insufficient for situations where constant, real-time contact is required, such as, for instance, during an underwater crisis. Neutrinos are currently being investigated as a possible alternative to ELF waves, because they can transmit up to 100 bits of data per second, three orders of magnitude more than radio waves can.
Virginia Tech physicist Patrick Huber believes that neutrino communication systems will soon become available, as the next generation of muon accelerators develops. He argues that, when a neutrino beam hits regular matter, it produces muons, which are easily detectable. The expert gives the example of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Chicago, from where a neutrino beam is accelerated over a distance of 700 kilometers to a 5,000-tonne detector, in northern Minnesota. However, in just over two years, only 730 muons were discovered at the facility.
“Obviously, an improvement of at least 6 orders of magnitude is required,” the expert says. However, he does provide a possible solution for mounting mobile muon detectors on submarines. “We would use thin muon detector modules which can be used very much like wallpaper to cover the majority of the vessel's hull,” essentially turning the subs into 100-meter-long, 10-meter-in-diameter muon detectors. “The muons would enter on one side of the submarine and leave it on the other side. The entry and exit points are measured and thus the the [sic] muon direction can be reconstructed quite precisely,” the expert concludes.