LIGHT FROM SPEEDING MIRRORS

摘要

In 1970, American physicist Gerald Moore proposed reversing the logic of the Casimir effect. He envisaged rapidly accelerating mirrors that would squeeze the vacuum fluctuations in the space between them so violently that they would give up some of their energy in the form of photons {Journal of Mathematical Physics, volll,p2679). In practice it is not possible to accelerate even a small macroscopic mirror fast enough to produce this "dynamical" Casimir effect so last year Chris Wilson and his team from the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, used rapidly varying electrical currents to simulate the effect of mirrors accelerating to something like a quarter of the speed of light. The result was the simultaneous production of pairs of photons from the vacuum, exactly as Moore had predicted (Nature, vol 479, p 376).