Prof. George Matsas

ABSTRACT: This year marks the 40’th anniversary of the Unruh effect. According to the Unruh effect, uniformly accelerated observers feel a thermal bath of elementary particles in the vaccum of inertial observers. We revisit it with emphasis on the observability issue which might seem to be a concern at firts sight, since the linear acceleration needed to reach a temperature 1 K is of order 10^20 m/s^2 . We close the talk by emphasizing that the Unruh effect does not require any verification beyond that of relativistic free field theory itself. The Unruh effect lives among us.