Local measurement of the Vacuum Energy?

[friend]

Is it possible to measure the vacuum energy locally? I wonder if it might change with gravity? I'm told that we can measure the vacuum energy globally by measuring the acceleration of the universe's expansion. But can we measure it locally? Or are all local measurements independent of the vacuum energy?

 

[wabbit]

This amounts to measuring the cosmological constant locally, which we can do for a broad enough definition of "locally" : )

But something that is related to that I think (or perhaps not, but I like it anyway ) : http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.6974
The Archimedes project: a feasibility study for weighing the vacuum energy
Enrico Calloni, S Caprara, Martina De Laurentis, Giampiero Esposito, M Grilli, Ettore Majorana, G P Pepe, S Petrarca, P Puppo, F Ricci, Luigi Rosa, Carlo Rovelli, P Ruggi, N L Saini, Cosimo Stornaiolo, Francesco Tafuri
(Submitted on 24 Sep 2014)

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 analyses the important parameters in view of the final measurement and experimentally explores solutions to the most critical problems.

 

[friend]

This amounts to measuring the cosmological constant locally, which we can do for a broad enough definition of "locally" : )

But something that is related to that I think (or perhaps not, but I like it anyway ) : http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.6974
The Archimedes project: a feasibility study for weighing the vacuum energy

Thank you. That seems spot on.

 

[wabbit]

Oh good, I wasn't quite sure that was what you has in mind. I've got to re-read that article too, remembered coming across it a while ago and finding it quite mesmerizing, being there right at the edge of possibility for precision detection and measurement of such subtle effects.