Seismic noise effect reduction improvement for ground-based investigation of space inertial sensor by suspending the electrode housing with an individual pendulum

Abstract

Abstract Seismic noise is one of the main limits of performance validation experiments for space inertial sensor on the ground. A two-stage electrostatically controlled torsion pendulum was developed and used to investigate the performances of space inertial sensor for TianQin. To further suppress the seismic noise effect, a novel scheme that introduces another pendulum to suspend the electrode housing (EH) simultaneously is proposed. By choosing proper suspension for the EH with respect to the original pendulum for the test mass (TM), the relative motion between the TM and the EH is insensitive to seismic noise due to common mode rejection, and the disturbance on the inertial sensor caused by seismic noise can be suppressed about five orders of magnitude theoretically. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the scheme can further suppress the seismic noise effect more than one order of magnitude.