William G Unruh - Measurement of acceleration temperature in a BEC

In 1976, I predicted that an accelerated detector (eg, of the electromagnetic field) would respond, in the vacuum, as though immersed in a thermal bath of that field with temperature proportional to the the acceleration. A group of us has made a proposal to use a laser probe as a type of microphone (converting sound waves to electromagnetic signals) to measure this effect in a Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC). This proposal thus combines BECs, and quantum optics, and uses lessons learned from the LIGO laser interferometric gravitational wave detector (including noise reduction by squeezing of the vacuum) to measure a novel quantum field theory effect.