Alexandra Binder
"I'll eat my boxer shorts live on TV, if it turns out to be true that neutrinos have broken the speed of light!" Tweeted the British nuclear physicist Jim Al-Khalili 2011. There they stood for the first time in the criticism, the tiny uncharged elementary particles that rush through space and can be found almost everywhere.
Billiards cross our body in a second, 5000 we radiate per second, because lead atoms decay in the body. But when the "Opera" team at the CERN of the European Organization for Nuclear Research presented measurement results that suggested that some elementary particles could be faster than the light, the fun was over. Physicists around the world reacted stunned. The story turned out to be the wrong result a year later.
But the story of the neutrinos really started. For three years later, 2015, the Japanese Takaaki Kajita and the Canadian Arthur McDonald received the Nobel Prize in Physics for a likewise new insight: The particles have a mass. That makes them even more exciting than they were before.
Neutrinos: all-rooted particles
"Physicists John Learned, Sandip Pakvasa, and Tony Zee have proposed using neutrinos to communicate with other star systems in the Milky Way, or to search for other civilizations," writes Heinrich Päs in "Neutrinos: The Perfect Wave" (Springer 2017). Patrick Huber from the Center for Neutrino Physics in Virginia has come up with an option for how submarines can communicate submerged thanks to neutrinos. And Neutrino Inc., an American-German company, wants to get even more energy from neutrinos, which is then used to drive electric cars. In the future, we will easily drive 2.000 kilometers with it - without charge, of course, because the stream of light elementary particles never breaks off.
Holger Thorsten Schubart, former real estate agent, is sure of that. He is the man who stands behind the German offshoot of battery power, which comes from virtually nothing. From the current electric mobility, he holds little: "As it is now, the model of electric car mobility is still a dumbing of the population and unless the electricity was generated alternatively, a fraud to the detriment of the environment and consumers and completely out of demand." Thus If a current electric car could drive 100 km, 10, 20 or 30 liters of oil or other fossil fuels would have to be burned somewhere, and the energy would then be transported for hundreds of kilometers, says Neutrino Deutschland GmbH Managing Director.
An infinite number as a vehicle
Schubart's auto solution is called "π1" (Pi = the infinite number) and is based on a self-sufficient conception: "Basically, we are working on a solar vehicle without range limitation." The difference to the conventional known solar technology, that is photovoltaic? "That we do not use the visible range of the radiation spectrum of the sun, but in particular the invisible radiation spectrum, and the 24 hours a day even in complete darkness."
The entire frame and body of Pi - which will come out of the 3D printer in the future, are made of high-density carbon derivatives and are intended to be the energy converter of this radiation energy. At least that's the plan. But is neutrino energy really good during acceleration or full load driving? Of course Schubart can not guarantee that. "In these cases, more energy is initially consumed than can be converted in the cell," he says, adding that even smaller conventional batteries would be used at the beginning.
"Not plausible"
However, if one asks physicists about the technical use of neutrino radiation, the words "unknown and physically not plausible" are repeated. The reason: Neutrinos hardly interact with matter. Even the experimental detection of neutrinos is therefore an extremely complex undertaking. For example, Stefan Recksiegel, a physicist at the Technical University of Munich, explains: "The largest neutrino flux on earth can be found near strong nuclear reactors. But even there you can only see a few hundred reactions per day in tons of reactors. That's too many orders of magnitude to make even one LED light up, not to mention charging batteries. "
Schubart does not disturb his critics, on the contrary, his slogan is: "We change history again". Because superlatives alone but no cars move and the promised for autumn 2017 rebuilt powered Neutrinopower Trabant was nowhere spotted until the editorial deadline, while inclined electric vehicle fans meanwhile meanwhile like to orient themselves otherwise.
Anti aging and five minutes of charge
For example, those who want to charge their electric car in just five minutes, for example, are right with the Israeli startup Storedot. Its flash battery technology relies on nanomaterials and organic compounds that have never been used in batteries and should be safer than the usual lithium-ion batteries. At the Cube Tech Fair in Berlin 2017, the company showed how it's done and above all that it works. In three years you want to come with the first electric cars on the market. For eco fans, the "Ryden Dual Carbon Battery" from Power Japan Plus could be something. The anode and cathode of the batteries are made of organically produced carbon and also the electrolyte is an organic chemical. Heavy metals, as in conventional batteries, are not there, the battery is biodegradable, charges about twenty times faster, but ages much slower. Anti Aging 2.0 so to speak.
Photo / Video: Shutterstock.
