/tech/ - Technology

Fermilab is a big atom-smasher particle-accelerator physics research project, in the US.It's no longuer the biggest project of this type, the currently biggest is the LHC in Switzerland. Threat-title is a Swiss-French speaking physicist quip about that. The biggest smasher under construction is in China

The fermilab had an interesting research project for neutrinos, and sort of was the front-runner in that area. However they had funding problems and might not be able to continue and there was some drama as well. There was a death and some close calls too.

Neutrinos are very light, low energy particles that don't interact much and hence can pass through matter without getting blocked. They occur naturally in the sun's core as a byproduct of nuclear fusion, but they are also generated by technology without nuclear reactions.

These neutrinos have interesting technological applications.
high power applications: is a neutrino-ray-cannon that can disable nukes by making them cook-off with 1-5% of their specified yield. Regardless where the nuke is or how fast it's going. No matter of shielding or how deep they are buried/submerged. It also doesn't do damage to anything else, so there's no political complications.
low power application is neutrino based communications. Those could become very energy efficient and no longer suffer from signal degradation from passing through objects (including the entire earth). So you can send signals to somebody on the other side of the planet by pointing the neutrino transmitter straight down. Jamming neutrino transmission would be impractical. The military obviously wants this for their ships, subs, bunkers and bases, the first generation of such devices (derived from research instruments see picture) would be super bulky , and likely limited to such niche applications. However eventually could be shrunk down to fit very small electronic devices.

I wonder whether this project is being sabotaged because the anti-nuke-ray would finish off the nuclear weapons industry, and neutrino communications would use a different more 3 dimensional network-topology and reshuffle the deck in communications, upstarts could potentially up-root the entrenched 2 dimensional telecoms.

Fermilab isn't the only research project that's doing neutrinos, so if this was industrial wreckers, they just delayed it a bit.

What do you think did somebody fuck with fermilab ?