The particle that powers the Neutrino® Energy Group’s energy architecture may also be the key to the world’s most resilient communication systems.
12,742. That is the diameter of the Earth in kilometres. It is also the name Holger Thorsten Schubart chose for the Neutrino® Energy Group’s frontier research into neutrino-based communication, and the choice is not decorative. It is a statement of intent. The entire diameter of the planet, from surface to core and out the other side, is not an obstacle for a neutrino. It is simply a distance to cross.
Every communication technology currently in use treats the Earth as an adversary. Radio waves attenuate in seawater within tens of metres. Fibre optic cables require physical infrastructure that can be severed, flooded, or destroyed. Electromagnetic signals cannot penetrate kilometres of rock. Even the most sophisticated conventional systems, the ones that connect submarines to the surface or maintain contact between underground facilities and the outside world, operate at the edge of what physics allows, using extremely low frequencies that carry almost no data and require enormous antenna infrastructure to function at all.
Neutrinos face none of these constraints. They cross oceans without attenuation. They pass through the planet’s crust as though it were not there. Trillions of them traverse every square centimetre of Earth’s surface every second, produced by the sun, by cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere, and by the natural radioactive processes in the planet’s interior. They do not interact with rock, water, or any conventional material in any meaningful way. That is precisely what makes them so difficult to detect, and precisely what makes them, in principle, so extraordinary as a communication medium.
What the Detectors Have Already Proven
The scientific infrastructure that makes Project 12742 conceivable already exists, built by the global physics community for entirely different purposes.
IceCube, the neutrino observatory buried in the Antarctic ice sheet at depths between 1,450 and 2,450 metres, has been detecting high-energy neutrinos arriving from across the universe since 2010. It demonstrated that neutrinos of sufficient energy can be detected in a known medium, at a known location, with a measurable interaction rate. KM3NeT, its Mediterranean counterpart, anchors thousands of photomultiplier sensors to the seafloor at depths exceeding three kilometres, detecting the faint light produced when a neutrino very occasionally collides with a water molecule. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory in China, JUNO, operates 700 metres underground and has produced some of the most precise measurements of neutrino flux and oscillation parameters to date.
None of these were built with communication in mind. They were built to study astrophysics and fundamental particle physics. But together they have established something that carries direct implications for Project 12742: that neutrinos can be produced, propagated through matter, and detected at a known location with measurable precision. The physics of neutrino transmission is not theoretical. It is documented, peer-reviewed, and replicated across three continents.
Earlier this year, researchers at MIT and collaborating institutions proposed what they describe as a neutrino laser: a compact system that would use Bose-Einstein condensates of radioactive atoms to produce coherent, concentrated neutrino beams through a quantum phenomenon called superradiance. The proposal remains at the conceptual stage, with significant engineering challenges still ahead. But its emergence from a leading research institution signals that the scientific community is beginning to think seriously about controlled neutrino production at scales relevant to practical applications.
The Communication Problem It Solves
To understand what neutrino-based data transmission would actually mean, it helps to think about the specific situations where every existing communication technology fails simultaneously.
A major earthquake destroys surface infrastructure across a wide region. Underground emergency management facilities need to coordinate with remote teams. Radio signals are disrupted by atmospheric ionisation. Cables have been severed. Satellite uplinks require functioning ground stations. The window for effective coordination in the first hours is precisely when communication is least available.
Or consider deep ocean research vessels that need to transmit data from several kilometres below the surface. The bandwidth available through current extremely-low-frequency systems is measured in bits per second. A message takes minutes. A data file takes hours.
Or consider the growing network of deep underground scientific facilities, geological monitoring stations, and geothermal installations that need to maintain data links to surface operations without routing cables through kilometres of solid rock.
In each of these cases, the problem is the same: the medium between sender and receiver blocks or degrades every form of conventional signal. Neutrinos, by their nature, do not experience that medium at all.
What Project 12742 Is Actually Exploring
The Neutrino® Energy Group frames Project 12742 not as a communication product ready for deployment, but as a research frontier investigating whether the properties that make neutrinos useful for energy conversion can be extended into information transfer.
The scientific foundation draws on the same validated physics that underpins the group’s energy work. The Schubart Master Formula, P(t) = η × ∫V Φ_eff(r,t) × σ_eff(E) dV, describes how ambient particle flux interacts with engineered nanomaterial architectures. The same interaction principles that allow a multilayer graphene-silicon stack to convert neutrino momentum transfer into electrical current are relevant to detecting modulated neutrino signals. If a source can be modulated and a detector can register that modulation, the conditions for information transfer exist.
The group’s international team of scientists and engineers, drawing on the broader research ecosystem that includes contributions from institutions across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, is working through the theoretical and material science requirements for this transition. The challenges are real and acknowledged. Neutrino interaction cross-sections are vanishingly small by design, which is the source of their transmission advantage and simultaneously the obstacle to building compact, efficient detectors. The engineering path from detection to communication involves solving problems at the intersection of particle physics, nanomaterial science, and signal processing that have no direct precedent.
The Longer View
What makes Project 12742 worth watching is not any claim about near-term deployment. It is the logic of where the science is heading.
The same global research community that spent decades building the detectors capable of registering individual neutrino events is now beginning, at institutions like MIT, to think about controlled production. The Neutrino® Energy Group‘s work in nanomaterial interaction has produced verified results in energy conversion that were themselves considered implausible a decade ago. The conductor of this ecosystem, Schubart, has consistently operated at the boundary between what physics permits and what engineering has not yet attempted.
“The physics was never hidden,” he has said. “It was simply never assembled for this purpose.”
That framing applies to communication as directly as it applies to energy. The particle has always been there, crossing oceans and continents without asking permission. The question Project 12742 is working to answer is whether, and when, it can be made to carry a message.