Compact neutrino detectors. Military applications?

[John Clark]

Neutrino detectors typically weigh many thousands of tons and need to be buried very deep underground, but in today's issue of the journal Nature researchers report they have made a neutrino detector that weighs just a few pounds (not counting the shielding needed to block cosmic rays), and yet it it was able to detect the low energy neutrinos given off by a nuclear reactor that was about 70 feet away, and it can detect all three types of neutrinos, electron, muon and tau neutrinos and their anti-particles too. The researchers say they are confident they can improve the sensitivity of their device in the future, if so I wonder if it could have military applications, such as in detecting nuclear submarines. Their set up needed a shield from cosmic rays that weighed about 10 tons but you could get the same amount of shielding if you just submerged the detector a few feet underwater. And if one detector wasn't sensitive enough it's so light I can't see why you couldn't run several hundred of them in parallel. 

Direct observation of coherent elastic antineutrino–nucleus scattering

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

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