Calibration of a superconducting gravimeter with an absolute atom gravimeter

TL;DR

This study demonstrates the calibration of a superconducting gravimeter using an absolute atom gravimeter, achieving high long-term stability and precise scale factor calibration, with potential for rapid calibration in future applications.

Contribution

It introduces a method for calibrating superconducting gravimeters with absolute atom gravimeters, improving long-term stability and calibration accuracy.

Findings

Achieved 0.5 nm/s² long-term stability of the atom gravimeter.

Calibrated the superconducting gravimeter scale factor with high precision.

Demonstrated potential for rapid calibration within one day.

Abstract

We present a 27-days long common view measurement of an absolute cold atom gravimeter (CAG) and a relative iGrav superconducting gravimeter, which we use to calibrate the iGrav scale factor. This allowed us to push the CAG long-term stability down to the level of 0.5~nm.s$^{-2}$. We investigate the impact of the duration of the measurement on the uncertainty in the determination of the correlation factor and show that it is limited to about 3\textperthousand~by the coloured noise of our cold atom gravimeter. A 3-days long measurement session with an additional FG5X absolute gravimeter allows us to directly compare the calibration results obtained with two different absolute meters. Based on our analysis, we expect that with an improvement of its long term stability, the CAG will allow to calibrate the iGrav scale factor to better than the per mille level (1$\sigma$ level of confidence) after only one-day of concurrent measurements for maximum tidal amplitudes.