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

Archimedes is a feasibility study to a future experiment to ascertain 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. The Archimedes experiment analizes the important parameters in view of the final measurement and experimentally explores solutions to the most critical problems.