Seeking the warm glow of the Unruh effect, reconfigurable hardware drives innovation in test and measurement

Physics World Weekly Podcast

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast the physicist and entrepreneur Daniel Shaddock explains how building gravitational-wave detectors inspired him to co-found a company that takes a novel approach to creating test and measurement equipment. Shaddock is CEO of Liquid Instruments, and he explains how the firm uses field programmable gate arrays to create instruments that can be reconfigured for a wide range of uses.

Also in the episode, we delve into the elusive Unruh effect – the curious quantum mechanical prediction that an accelerating object is bathed in a warm glow of radiation that bubbles up from empty space. Our expert guide is Morgan Lynch of Seoul National University, who explains how the effect can be observed in the lab.

• Morgan Lynch and colleagues describe their observation of the Unruh effect in this paper: “Experimental observation of acceleration-induced thermality”. You can read more about the Waterloo-MIT proposal for observing the Unruh effect in this Physics World article: “‘Warm glow’ of Unruh effect could be seen in the lab using accelerated electrons”.