If we had the ability to detect neutrinos in such a small volume as a solar panel they’d be immensely valuable for communication - we’d be able to beam signals directly through the Earth, or through deep water.

Following that same line, if we had that ability, it would be useful for communicating to deep submarines like the U.S. used to do with Project Sanguine[0] and ELF waves :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine

It's an enormous amount of energy packed into a single tiny particle.

But it's still just a single tiny particle, so it's not a lot of total energy.

It's like how you can lift a heavy weight for a second, but that's all you can do. You would need to be able to lift it for hours to be useful as a replacement for a crane. Same idea: Intensity vs total work.

Neutrinos interact extremely weakly with ordinary matter, which is why the detectors are typically huge volumes of water. Even then, the neutrinos interact with the purpose-built detectors on the order of one in a trillion. A neutrino power generator is not a feasible thing to build.

Unless you're next to an exploding star, in which case you have other problems/opportunities.

There's nothing to optimize here, neutrinos just interact very very weakly with anything else because they don't carry charge (so no electrical interactions), don't carry color charge (so no nuclear interactions), don't carry weak charge (so no weak force interactions) and have tiny tiny masses, but they are still bosons (so don't act as field carriers like photons do, they're just regular matter). Their low chance of interacting with matter is a fundamental property of them, there's nothing you can do about it through technology, just like you can't create heavier electrons or weaker quarks.

> don't carry weak charge (so no weak force interactions)

Left neutrino have weak hypercharge, so they are produce by weak interactions and are detected using the weak interaction. And also gravity.

Right neutrinos (if they exist) have no weak hypercharge so they only interact by gravity.

Thanks for the correction!

It might improve the quality of neutrino astronomy to have the world's solar panels also be neutrino detectors.