Have You Heard Any Unconventional Ideas for Detecting Neutrinos?

[grokkin]

Has anyone come across any "far out there" ideas for neutrino detection? Just looking for some food for thought.

 

[ZapperZ]

If such ideas are so "far out" that they haven't been published in peer-reviewed journals, then they can't be discussed here, per the PF Rules.

Zz.

 

[mitchell porter]

Hopefully there's some allowance made for original thought, so long as it's based on reasonable physics. For example, I'm sure no-one ever published a proposal to detect solar neutrinos by placing enormous tanks of heavy water in an intra-Mercurian solar orbit, yet who could say where a discussion of that idea would lead? It sounds silly, but it might have a less-silly variation.

 

[Bill_K]

Hm, for example we could bury a gigantic array of photomultiplier tubes at the South Pole, and look for Cherenkov radiation in the ice. But that idea is just too silly!

 

[mfb]

You could use the moon as active material and detect impacts there with radio telescopes on earth. Is that far out enough?
A bit more earth-based are the ANITA results - balloons, flying 35km over antarctica.

 

[Pengwuino]

The methods we use already AREN'T far out enough?

 

[grokkin]

Far out ideas: something like a Z-boson condensate (whatever that means)... or a dense flux of W or Z bosons orthogonal to the path of neutrinos... something along those lines. I was just looking for some food for thought... something to think about over the next say 5 years and hopefully end up with something more fleshed out than just random speculation. Something outside of liquid argon methods or the ice cube, etc... something that would meaningfully increase the probability of detection besides just increasing the size of the detector. I fully realize that no currently known methods exist that fit this criteria. I was hoping to solicit speculation and perhaps something interesting might emerge from the discussion. Any thoughts?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Yes - those are exactly the sort of ideas that Zz warned about.