What is a neutrino bomb?

Answer 1

I linked an article below that describes a rather unscientific theory of mass extinction resulting from a so-called "Neutrino Bomb;" one of the effects caused by a "silent" stellar collapse.

However, if you're inquiring about what a neutrino bomb would be as an actual, explosive device, continue reading.

I suppose a neutrino bomb, if such a thing were even remotely possible, would be a bomb that either a) released an incredible amount of neutrinos in an attempt to induce an irreversible amount of damage to the human body from the increased number of ionized radiation events, or b) produced enough neutrino-antineutrino annihilation events to actually cause damage from the energy released from those events.

The absurdity of both of those ideas is so extreme, that I actually had a difficult time typing them out. To understand why, consider the following:

a) Around 65 billion neutrinos, from the sun alone mind you, pass through every square centimeter of your body every second. However, only about 2 or 3 of those neutrinos will actually react inside of your body throughout your entire life.

b) The amount of lead (Pb) that would be needed to react with even half of the neutrinos passing through it, would need to be a light year long in the direction that the neutrino was traveling; that's 10 trillion kilometers.

c) Those incredibly large neutrino detectors that were built to experimentally show that neutrinos have mass (see linked picture) only observed 10 or so neutrino reactions a day, and that's after they were maximized for detection in every conceivable way.

d) Assuming that neutrinos and antineutrinos are different particles (we still don't know), and assuming that a substance was created that was dense enough to produce multiple neutrino-antineutrino annihilation events (not a single annihilation event has ever been observed, by the way), the amount of energy that each of the resultant gamma rays would have from each annihilation reaction would be around 1 MeV. For the sake of comparison, the radioactive isotope, 40K, that is found inside every single person on Earth, releases four hundred 1.5 MeV gamma rays per second inside the human body. Those gamma rays do an undetectable amount of damage, if any damage at all, to the human body throughout its entire lifespan, so it's highly unlikely that the few neutrino-antineutrino annihilation events that would happen from the bomb, if any would happen at all, would be very harmful.