Hawking-like Effects and Unruh-like Effects: toward Experiments ?

The Hawking effect and the Unruh effect are two of the most important predictions in the theoretical physics of the last quarter of the 20th century. In parallel to the theoretical investigations there is great interest in the possibility of revealing effects of this type in some sort of experiments. I present a general discussion of the proposals to measure the Hawking and Unruh effects and/or their ‘analogues’ in the laboratory, and I make brief comments on each of them. The reader may also find the various physical pictures corresponding to the two effects which were applied to more common phenomena, and vice versa.