--- title: New research shows a neutrino laser is impossible description: MIT physicist Wolfgang Ketterle and postdocs Hanzhen Lin and Yu-Kun Lu have shown, in two companion Physical Review Letters papers, that the previously... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/new-research-shows-a-neutrino-laser-is-impossible-9ud5khzle twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: New research shows a neutrino laser is impossible | daily.dev og:description: MIT physicist Wolfgang Ketterle and postdocs Hanzhen Lin and Yu-Kun Lu have shown, in two companion Physical Review Letters papers, that the previously... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/new-research-shows-a-neutrino-laser-is-impossible-9ud5khzle og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/9Ud5kHzlE.png og:image:alt: New research shows a neutrino laser is impossible og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # New research shows a neutrino laser is impossible **[MIT News](https://daily.dev/sources/mit)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary MIT physicist Wolfgang Ketterle and postdocs Hanzhen Lin and Yu-Kun Lu have shown, in two companion Physical Review Letters papers, that the previously proposed 'neutrino laser' concept is physically impossible. The 2025 proposal by Joe Formaggio and Ben Jones suggested that cooling radioactive atoms into a Bose-Einstein condensate could produce superradiant amplification of neutrino emission, analogous to how photon superradiance works. Ketterle's team found two independent flaws: the recoil from neutrino emission is so energetic (atoms recoiling at velocities equivalent to Mach 10) that it destroys any quantum imprint needed for amplification, and neutrinos' fermionic nature produces an 'anti-memory' effect that actively prevents directional beam buildup rather than reinforcing it. A similar gamma-ray superradiance proposal was also shown to be impossible. Formaggio maintains the debate has been constructive and that neutrino physics has a history of surprising researchers. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. 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