New research shows a neutrino laser is impossible

Neutrinos are the pervasive yet intangible particles that permeate the universe, streaming through whole planets, stars, and our bodies by the trillions each second. The elementary particles are often described as “ghostly” for their near-zero mass and their elusive nature, as they have very little interaction with normal matter. Since their discovery in 1956, neutrinos have continued to surprise physicists with their unexpected properties and behaviors. For instance, the particles come in multiple “flavors” and can morph from one to the other like subatomic shape-shifters. Neutrinos may also be their own anti-particle, in a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like quantum duality. And their extremely weak interactions make them nearly impossible to detect.  Last year, scientists seemed to add to the particle’s mystique, with a concept for a neutrino laser. They proposed that a concentrated beam of neutrinos could be produced by cooling a cloud of radioactive atoms to nanokelvin temperatures, one-billionth the temperature of interstellar space. Slowed to a near-frozen crawl, the atoms would form a Bose-Einstein condensate and should act as one quantum, coherent whole, in a way that speeds up and amplifies their radioactive decay. The physicists assumed that neutrinos, being a natural byproduct of radioactive decay, should also be amplified, and that such a process should emit a laser-like beam of the ghostly particles. But work by MIT physicists has now shown that the neutrino laser concept, and a similar proposal for gamma-rays, is impossible. In two companion papers appearing today in Physical Review Letters, Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT, together with postdocs Hanzhen Lin and Yu-Kun Lu, presents a two-part analysis that demonstrates both concepts are physically and fundamentally not possible. More specifically, they have shown that the neutrino laser concept is flawed, due to “recoil” (as in, the kinetic energy created by the reaction), and due to a neutrino’s fundamental “fermionic” nature. “These two papers are sort of punch one and punch two,” Ketterle says. “Each paper would have killed the proposal.”MIT professor of physics Joe Formaggio, who put forth the neutrino laser proposal with Ben Jones, who at the time was associate professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington, sees the new results as a convincing and constructive challenge. “When a new idea — such as the one we proposed — is shared, it is the duty of the community to scrutinize it. Such is the scientific process,” Formaggio says. “Indeed, it was great to see how our paper generated a lot of thinking outside of our original concept. We suspect that will continue.”A quantum amplifierThe proposal for a neutrino laser was based on the idea of “superradiance” — a quantum, amplifying effect that had only been observed for photons. One form of superradiance occurs when a cloud of atoms is cooled to near absolute zero, at which point an atom’s motion is determined not by thermal effects, but purely by quantum uncertainty. In this state of near standstill, which is known as a “Bose-Einstein condensate,” (BEC) the atoms move in sync, as a quantumly correlated whole. If photons are pumped into the condensate as a laser beam, the atoms synchronize to scatter the photons back out, in the exact same direction. In contrast, a cloud of atoms at room temperature would simply scatter the photons in random directions, generating, at best, a soft glow. As photons scatter off atoms, the atoms should in turn “recoil,” as if they were physically pushed backward from the impact. In a BEC, because the atoms recoil in sync, the rate at which they scatter photons, in the same direction, grows exponentially. This amplifying effect results in a “superradiant” laser of photons, which scientists have observed. In their proposal, Formaggio and Jones, who is now at the University of Manchester, suggested that the same superradiant effect could be possible for radioactive atoms, which naturally emit neutrinos as they decay. If a cloud of radioactive atoms were cooled to form a Bose-Einstein condensate, a similar amplifying effect should kick in and generate a concentrated beam of neutrinos as the atoms decay in sync. To illustrate their point, they outlined a scenario in which a cloud of radioactive rubidium atoms, once cooled into a BEC, would accelerate its radioactive decay, from a half-life of 86 days, to one minute.No one has ever produced a BEC from radioactive atoms. But if it could be done, then the quantum state should, in theory, produce a neutrino laser. Instant recoilFor Ketterle, the idea seemed too good to be true. Ketterle is the leading expert on Bose-Einstein condensates, which he co-discovered in 1995, and for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. He and his group at MIT have revealed many surprising properties in Bose-Einstein condensates and other ultracold matter, where the energy of atoms is at their lowest.“My experience has always been that the condensate can do marvelous things at low energy — superfluidity, vortices — and if you were to speak in a room filled with condensate, it would take one hour for you to hear my voice. That’s how slow the condensate is,” Ketterle says. “And I had always come to the conclusion that for anything violent, like nuclear reactions, the condensate would not do anything.”Compared to visible photons, which have an energy of 1 electron volt, neutrinos are naturally emitted as atoms decay, with a million times more energy. When a neutrino blasts out from an atom, the emission should cause the atom in turn to recoil a million times more strongly than for visible photons. “As long as the recoil atom stays in the condensate, it can make the condensate superradiant,” Ketterle says. “But when a neutrino is emitted at a million electronvolts, the atom recoils at velocities equivalent to Mach 10, faster than a fighter jet. This is so fast that the atom would almost instantly disappear.”Even so, the neutrino laser proposal assumed that the escaped atom should leave a sort of quantum imprint in the condensate, which tells the condensate as a whole to emit future neutrinos in the same exact, laser-like direction.But in the first of two new papers, Ketterle and his team show through a theoretical analysis that this is not the case. They considered a model that describes superradiance. This model determines the conditions that would lead to superradiance of photons. Ketterle applied the model to the case of radioactive atoms and neutrinos, taking into account the range of energies at which the particles are emitted, as well as the resulting recoil of the decaying atom and the dynamics of the condensate throughout. These calculations showed that, in every scenario the team considered, superradiance was not possible. The atom simply recoiled too fast for any quantum imprint to build up. It was as if the condensate instantly loses the “memory” of the neutrino emitted, and therefore would continue emitting neutrinos as atoms normally would, without enhancement.An anti-memoryIn their second paper, the MIT researchers showed that in addition to being impossible due to a physical recoil effect, the concept of a neutrino laser is flawed due to the fundamental nature of neutrinos. They found that even if a recoiling atom were to leave a quantum imprint in the condensate, the imprint would not be of what to emit next, but rather, what not to emit. In other words, the memory of the emitted neutrino would tell the condensate to emit the next neutrino in any other direction, preventing the buildup of a directional neutrino beam. The researchers showed that this opposing memory, or “anti-correlation,” is due to the fact that a neutrino is, fundamentally, a fermion. Fermions and bosons are the two fundamental classes of particles that make up all the matter in the universe. Bosons are particles with whole-integer spins, such as photons. In contrast, fermions, such as electrons and neutrinos, have half-integer spins. Whether a particle has a whole or half integer spin determines how it interacts at a quantum level with other particles. “In superradiance, it is about a memory effect, or quantum correlations in the condensate. And in that context, people had thought that whatever is emitted from the condensate, it doesn’t matter if it is a boson or a fermion,” Ketterle explains. “But we analyzed it, and if you describe it correctly for emitted fermions, you get an anti-memory, which makes the condensate not accelerate in a superradiant form. It rather has the memory to not do it.”Ketterle, Formaggio, and Jones have met on numerous occasions to talk through the original neutrino laser proposal, and Ketterle’s challenge to it.“I suspect that someday, someone will do the experiment,” Formaggio says. “Nature, as always, is the final arbiter of such things. And here I would be remiss to not point out that every prior prediction about neutrinos has been wrong. The one thing about neutrinos that never surprises physicists is that they never fail to surprise.”In part, Ketterle agrees: “Creative ideas and discussions among scientists are needed to uncover nature’s surprises,” he says. “But in the case of neutrino lasers, the surprise was too good to be true.”This research is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Center for Ultracold Atoms, the Vannevar-Bush Faculty Fellowship, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the U.S. Army Research Office.