By Amit Malewar Published: September 9, 2025
Collected at: https://www.techexplorist.com/physicists-propose-lasers-fire-neutrino-beams/100909/
Right now, trillions of tiny particles called neutrinos are zipping through your body and everything around you, like cosmic phantoms. They don’t bump into anything, don’t leave a trace, and you’ll never feel them. They’re smaller than electrons, lighter than light itself, and yet they’re the most common massive particles in the universe.
But here’s the twist: no one knows precisely how much they weigh. Measuring a neutrino’s mass is like trying to weigh a ghost with a feather.
So, scientists get clever. They use nuclear reactors and giant machines called particle accelerators to create unstable atoms. These atoms fall apart (decay), spitting out neutrinos in the process. By studying these ghostly beams, physicists hope to crack the mystery of the neutrino’s mass and unlock secrets about the universe itself.
Imagine building a neutrino generator not in a sprawling underground lab, but on a tabletop. That’s what MIT physicists are now proposing, a compact way to create bursts of neutrinos using a technique that sounds like science fiction: a neutrino laser.
Here’s how it works: take a gas of radioactive atoms and cool it down to temperatures colder than deep space. At these extreme chills, the atoms stop acting like individuals and start behaving like one big quantum team. When they decay, they do it in perfect sync, like a chorus of atoms singing the same note.
This synchronized decay releases neutrinos in a powerful, amplified beam, similar to how regular lasers shoot out light by lining up photons. Except this time, it’s neutrinos: the ghostly particles that usually slip through matter unnoticed.
Study co-author Ben Jones, PhD’15, an associate professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington, said, “In our concept for a neutrino laser, the neutrinos would be emitted at a much faster rate than they normally would, sort of like a laser emits photons very fast.”
The team calculated that their proposed neutrino laser could be built using just 1 million atoms of rubidium-83, a radioactive element with a slow burn. Usually, these atoms take 82 days for half of them to decay and release neutrinos.
But here’s the quantum twist: if you chill those atoms to temperatures colder than deep space, they start acting like a single, synchronized quantum entity.
Co-author Joseph Formaggio, professor of physics at MIT, said, “This is a novel way to accelerate radioactive decay and the production of neutrinos, which, to my knowledge, has never been done.”
Years ago, physicists Formaggio and Jones had a bold idea: what if we could boost neutrino production by using quantum coherence? They imagined cooling radioactive atoms, like tritium, to ultra-low temperatures, forming a strange state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). In a BEC, particles stop acting solo and move as one unified quantum entity.
Sounds promising. But there’s a catch: radioactive atoms decay quickly, making it nearly impossible to cool them down enough to form a BEC before they vanish.
Still, Formaggio ran the math. Could a BEC somehow speed up radioactive decay and unleash a flood of neutrinos?
Turns out, nope. As he puts it, “It was a red herring.” Cooling atoms into a BEC doesn’t make them decay faster or produce more neutrinos.
Years after shelving the neutrino-BEC idea, physicist Jones revisited the concept with a new twist: superradiance, a phenomenon where atoms, when synced up in a quantum state, release a sudden, intense burst of light.
What if radioactive atoms, cooled into a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), could do the same, but instead of photons, they’d unleash a burst of neutrinos?
Jones and Formaggio dove into the math, borrowing equations from quantum optics to see how light-emitting atoms transition from a calm, coherent state into a superradiant blaze, and then applied those same equations to radioactive atoms in a BEC.
Formaggio explains, “The outcome is: You get a lot more photons more quickly, and when you apply the same rules to something that gives you neutrinos, it will give you a whole bunch more neutrinos more quickly. That’s when the pieces clicked together, that superradiance in a radioactive condensate could enable this accelerated, laser-like neutrino emission.”
Physicists discovered that when rubidium-83 atoms are cooled into a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), they decay much faster, releasing a laser-like burst of neutrinos in just minutes instead of weeks.
Now that the math backs it up, they’re taking the next step: building a tabletop experiment to see if this ghostly beam can be created in real life.
Jones says, “It should be enough to take this radioactive material, vaporize it, trap it with lasers, cool it down, and then turn it into a Bose-Einstein condensate. Then it should start doing this superradiance spontaneously.”
Journal Reference:
- B. J. P. Jones and J. A. Formaggio. Superradiant Neutrino Lasers from Radioactive Condensates. Physical Review Letters. DOI: 10.1103/l3c1-yg2l
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