In the measurement of the gravitational constant G with angular acceleration method, the equilibrium position of torsion pendulum with tungsten fiber undergoes a linear slow drift, which results in a quadratic slow drift on the angular velocity of the torsion balance turntable under feedback control unit. The accurate amplitude determination of the useful angular acceleration signal with known frequency is biased by the linear slow drift and the coupling effect of the drifting equilibrium position and the room fixed gravitational background signal. We calculate the influences of the linear slow drift and the complex coupling effect on the value of G, respectively. The result shows that the bias of the linear slow drift on G is 7 ppm, and the influence of the coupling effect is less than 1 ppm.

Due to the high-Q fused silica fiber's extreme sensitivity to temperature change, the period estimation of torsion pendulum with high precision depends on the effective correction of the thermoelastic effect. In the measurement of G with the time-of-swing method, we analyze the complex relation between temperature and the pendulum's period and propose a developed method to find the shear thermoelasticity coefficient as well as isolate the influence of temperature on period alone. The result shows that the shear thermoelasticity coefficient is 101(2) × 10(-6)/°C, the resultant correction to Δ(ω(2)) is 9.16(0.18) ppm, and the relative uncertainty to G is less than 1 ppm.

Thermal noise is one of the most fundamental limits to the sensitivity in weak equivalence principle test with a rotating torsion pendulum. Velocity damping and internal damping are two of many contributions at the thermal noise, and which one mainly limits the torsion pendulum in low frequency is difficult to be verified by experiment. Based on the conventional method of fast Fourier transform, we propose a developed method to determine the thermal noise limit and then obtain the precise power spectrum density of the pendulum motion signal. The experiment result verifies that the thermal noise is mainly contributed by the internal damping in the fiber in the low frequency torsion pendulum experiment with a high vacuum. Quantitative data analysis shows that the basic noise level in the experiment is about one to two times of the theoretical value of internal damping thermal noise.

Based on statistical properties, two typical models are considered to calculate the uncertainties for some random noise sequences on the period extraction of a torsion pendulum, which is important and instructive in the measurement of gravitational constant G with the time-of-swing method. An expression of the uncertainty for the period measurement is obtained, which is dependent on the ratio ∆t/(1/λ ) where ∆t is the interval of the sample time and 1/λ is the length of the correlation time. The result of processing experimental data shows that as the interval of the sample time ∆t gradually shortens, the uncertainty of the period becomes smaller, and further when the ratio ∆t/(1/λ ) is less than 1, the uncertainty remains substantially unchanged.

Abstract. In the measurement of G using time-of-swing method, the accurate determination of G depends on the period extraction of torsion balance with high precision. There are a great many methods of extracting period, and the nonlinear least squares fitting method and the correlation method are most frequently applied to extract the torsion balance period accurately. Though some papers have claimed the two methods are equivalent, lacking in complete theoretical derivation. In this paper, the influence of Gaussian white noise on the period extraction accuracy by the two methods is theoretically derived detailedly and simulated in MATLAB. Both results show that although there exists some differences between two methods in process of data analysis, the accuracy of period extraction is still the same.