In the Media

According to new research by MIT physicists, a laser able to capture neutrinos, abundant yet intangible particles in the universe, is likely impossible to build, writes New Scientist’s Karmela Padavic-Callaghan. “The key to the neutrino laser proposal was a memory effect: when an atom in the BEC (Bose-Einstein condensate) emitted a neutrino, it would be more likely to continue emitting more neutrinos in the same direction, thus pushing them into a beam, because the quantum state that all the ultracold atoms share would retain a trace of that first emission,” Padavic-Callaghan explains. “[Prof. Wolfgang] Ketterle and his colleagues showed that this memory, although present, would be about 10,000 billion times too brief to affect the neutrinos as intended.”