The Archimedes project: A feasibility study for weighing the vacuum energy

Abstract

Archimedes is a pathfinder experiment aimed at verifying the feasibility of measuring the interaction of vacuum fluctuations with gravity. The future experiment should measure the force that the earth's gravitational field exerts on a Casimir cavity by using a balance as the small force detector. Archimedes analyzes the important parameters of the future experiment and experimentally explores solutions to the most critical problems.