| The Casimir force arises from an alteration of boundary condition in vacuum and is often regarded as a manifestation of quantum zero point energy. Considerable progress has been made in the last decade with an impressive achievement of experimental precision at the level of 1%.;In this thesis, we explore the experimental aspects of both conservative and dissipative Casimir effects to illuminate some of the systematic and technical challenges connected with the verification of both effects. In particular, we have developed an apparatus to investigate the Casimir force in the sphere-plane and the cylinder-plane geometries where we have found important systematic issues, which apparently have not been handled carefully in previous force measurements. We also study the observed short-range force in the context of finite conductivity corrections to the Casimir force.;A material body with non-uniform acceleration undergoes dissipation due to the presence of zero point energies in quantum vacuum. This so-called dynamical Casimir effect has not been yet verified, and we propose a novel experimental scheme by exploiting superradiance of ultracold atoms in their hyperfine transition. Our proposed scheme expands the experimentally accessible window by allowing for detection of the motion-induced photons as small as a few units. |
