Groundbreaking laser of ghostly particles may be impossible to build
A year ago, researchers made a splash with a wildly creative idea for building a laser from notoriously elusive particles, but a new analysis shows this is probably impossible
Neutrinos present some of the most enigmatic mysteries in modern physics, but researchers believed they could study them by directing them through a laser beam. However, two new analyses reveal that neutrinos are too elusive for such a project to work. Scientists have been studying neutrinos since the 1940s, and despite being the most abundant particles in the universe, their exact mass remains unknown.
In 2025, Ben Jones and Joseph Formaggio proposed a novel approach to gain clarity – they designed a laser beam of neutrinos using thousands of extremely cold radioactive atoms. Mathematicians Wolfgang Ketterle and his team at MIT subsequently disproved this theory with rigorous mathematical investigations, uncovering both technical and fundamental obstacles to the proposed neutrino laser design.
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