A Neutrino Beacon

TL;DR

This paper proposes a neutrino-based interstellar beacon using gravitational lensing by compact objects, enabling signals with low extinction that require advanced civilizations to construct highly specialized transmitters.

Contribution

It introduces a novel neutrino beacon concept leveraging gravitational lensing for amplification, expanding SETI methods beyond electromagnetic signals.

Findings

Neutrinos can be used as interstellar signals with low medium extinction.

Gravitational lensing by neutron stars or black holes can significantly amplify neutrino beams.

A large constellation of transmitters would be needed for sky coverage, implying advanced civilization requirements.

Abstract

Observational SETI has concentrated on using electromagnetism as the carrier , namely radio waves and laser radiation. Michael Hippke [2] has pointed out that it may be possible to use neutrinos or gravitational waves as signals. Gravitational waves demand the command of the generation of very large scale amounts of energy, Jackson and Benford [3]. This paper describes a beacon that uses beamed neutrinos as the signal. Neutrinos, like gravitational waves, have the advantage of extremely low extinction in the interstellar medium. To make use of neutrinos an advanced civilization can use a gravitational lens as a focus and amplifier. The lens can be a neutron star or a black hole. Using wave optics one can calculate the advantage of gravitational lensing for amplification of a beam and along the optical axis it is exceptionally large. Even though the amplification is very large the dimeter of the beam is quite small, less that a centimeter. This implies that a large constellation of neutrino transmitters would have to enclose the local neutron star or black hole to cover the sky. This means that such a beacon would have to be built by a Kardashev Type II civilization.