A vibration correction system for cold atom gravimeter

Abstract

Abstract Cold atom gravimeters are used to measure the absolute value of the gravitational acceleration. To mitigate the influence of seismic noise on the mirror, a vibration correction system is used. A commercial seismometer CMG-3ESPC is employed to measure the mirror vibration. The transfer function between the mirror vibration and the output of the seismometer is regarded as a proportional element with a time delay. The best proportional element and the best time delay are obtained by minimizing the standard deviation of the fitting residuals of the interference fringe α − P with vibration correction. This system not only exhibits excellent environmental adaptability but also eliminates the need for rough estimation of local gravitational acceleration during the vibration correction process. The system was built on the homemade cold atom gravimeter to carry out experiments in the laboratory. Compared with the measurement results without vibration correction, the standard deviation of the gravity measurement results was reduced from 120.5 μ Gal to 4.2 μ Gal, resulting in a significant reduction by a factor of 28.7. Meanwhile, its sensitivity was significantly improved from 330.8 μ Gal Hz − 1 to 18.0 μ Gal Hz − 1 by performing vibration correction. In the future, this system is expected to carry out comprehensive verification experiments in more complex noisy environments.