The Future of Submarine Communications
In the past couple years, scientists at Virginia Tech have been researching using neutrinos to communicate. Neutrinos are similar to electrons, but have no charge. They travel at the speed of light and remain mostly undisturbed as they pass through any medium -- but when they do pass through any medium, including water, they produce muons, unstable particles that last about 2 microseconds before decaying. Using neutrinos, it would be possible to communicate with a sub at about 100 bps. This is magnitudes better than the only 1 bit per minute that is possible with Extremely Low Frequency radio.
But detecting tiny particles that decay rapidly is not so easy. Because they pass through anything, they are nearly impossible to detect. MINOS, an experiment that sends an intense beam of neutrinos from Chicago to a mine in Minnesota (~700km), has been trying to precisely detect these particles. The scientists have discovered a way to put detectors into the submarine with little to no big design changes, but there hasn't been enough success actually detecting the muons to make neutrino communication practical just yet.
Even if this technology was successful, neutrino communication would only be possible one way: to the submarine. However, this may be enough. Often the messages sent to the submarine are coordinate information or tell the submarine when it is and is not save to breach, so this one way communication could be enough to revolutionize submarine warfare.
A more in depth article about Neutrinos can be found here in MIT's Technology Review: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24203/
But detecting tiny particles that decay rapidly is not so easy. Because they pass through anything, they are nearly impossible to detect. MINOS, an experiment that sends an intense beam of neutrinos from Chicago to a mine in Minnesota (~700km), has been trying to precisely detect these particles. The scientists have discovered a way to put detectors into the submarine with little to no big design changes, but there hasn't been enough success actually detecting the muons to make neutrino communication practical just yet.
Even if this technology was successful, neutrino communication would only be possible one way: to the submarine. However, this may be enough. Often the messages sent to the submarine are coordinate information or tell the submarine when it is and is not save to breach, so this one way communication could be enough to revolutionize submarine warfare.
A more in depth article about Neutrinos can be found here in MIT's Technology Review: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24203/