I tend to like science that doesn't require building vast entities like the LHC at CERN. Stuff I could do on the kitchen table is more my scene and hopefully simple enough to show my grandson, at least in principle. Wilson, C., Johansson, G., Pourkabirian, A., Simoen, M., Johansson, J., Duty, T., Nori, F., & Delsing, P. (2011). Observation of the dynamical Casimir effect in a superconducting circuit Nature, 479 (7373), 376-379 DOI: 10.1038/nature10561 is an example - though I actually can't do this one.
I went through undergraduate chemistry "knowing" about virtual particles, though I mistakenly thought they were accounting devices rather than real. I "knew" too that vacuums were full of such stuff. The thought experiments all seemed undoable. Here's a description of the plucking light from vacuum job. "In addition, there is also the dynamic Casimir effect. This occurs if the mirrors are moving very fast so that the electromagnetic field in- between has no time to adjust. Instead, the ripples in the field caused by the fast mirror movement lead to the emission of a light particle. Basically, the mirrors create light out of the electromagnetic field in a similar way that a guitar player generates sounds from plucking a string. The problem with the experimental realization of the dynamic Casimir effect is that the mirrors need to move seriously fast. Otherwise the system has time to adjust to the new geometry of the mirrors, and no light will be excited. We are talking about speeds close to the speed of light! Such fast mirror movements are simply not possible with mechanical mirrors. What is needed is an analogue that changes the dimension of the vacuum by other means. Fortunately, such systems exist in superconducting circuits, where magnetic fields applied to a so-called SQUID circuit on a chip achieve the same moving mirror function for electromagnetic fields. Moreover, fast-changing magnetic fields are no problem to create. In the present experiment the mirrors ‘move’ at a quarter of the speed of light, which corresponds to a driving frequency for the magnetic field of more than 10 gigahertz. The dynamic Casimir is clearly observed, with light being generated at the expected frequencies. This is certainly a beautiful study confirming the intriguing properties of quantum mechanics. And what’s more, it doesn’t need Hawking’s black holes to experiment with them, all that’s needed is a table-top setup of superconducting circuits. This ease of experimentation will make sure we will learn much more about these virtual fluctuations in vacuum from future experiments." As a kid I used to hear that money could not be produced from thin air and such - these days it seems more and more of what was nothing actually is something.
