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Tuning the stiffness balance is crucial to full-band common-mode rejection for a superconducting gravity gradiometer (SGG). A reliable method to do so has been proposed and experimentally tested. In the tuning scheme, the frequency response functions of the displacement of individual test mass upon common-mode accelerations were measured and thus determined a characteristic frequency for each test mass. A reduced difference in characteristic frequencies between the two test masses was utilized as the criterion for an effective tuning. Since the measurement of the characteristic frequencies does not depend on the scale factors of displacement detection, stiffness tuning can be done independently. We have tested this new method on a single-component SGG and obtained a reduction of two orders of magnitude in stiffness mismatch.

A superconducting gravimeter based on the superconducting quantum interference device system is under development. As the main source of low-frequency noise, temperature fluctuations affect the resolution of superconducting gravimeters. In this study, a set of experimental devices was built to investigate the primary coupling processes of temperature fluctuations in superconducting gravimeters. Under the temperature modulation method, the effects of temperature fluctuations can be expressed as dΦ/dT = 342(2)Φ0/K, which, according to theoretical analysis, corresponds to a displacement change of (1.38 ± 0.04) × 10−7 m/K. Based on these results, the ambient temperature is controlled to within ±100 µK, and the equivalent effect of temperature fluctuations on our superconducting gravimeter is 0.5 μGal.

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