One-year long common view measurements with continuous gravimeters

Since a few years, several laboratories, institutes or organizations through the world have acquired marketed quantum absolute gravimeters AQG developed by Muquans. Among their potentialities, these new generations of instruments are expected to complement the existing capabilities of long term monitoring of the Earth gravity field. A metrological evaluation of their performances for long-term measurements is thus a first step.

The LNE-SYRTE gravimetry laboratory in the suburb of Paris, has been designed to accommodate other gravimeters for metrological comparisons, tests and calibrations. Instruments of different classes operate in this well characterized laboratory: a laboratory-based absolute cold atom gravimeter (CAG) and a relative superconducting gravimeter iGrav. Both instruments allow for continuous measurements, Accuracy is guaranteed by the CAG and long-term stability by the iGrav.

We there have performed a more than one-year long measurement session with the initial version of the marketed quantum gravimeter AQG (AQG-A01).

An improved version of this AQG (AQG-B01) designed for outdoor measurement and recently acquired by RESIF (the French Seismologic and Geodetic Network) has been also implemented to close this session with a last month of simultaneous data recording involving all the instruments. Finally, we also performed supplementary accuracy tests, in particular to evaluate the Coriolis bias of the two AQG commercial sensors.

The talk will briefly present the different instruments to rapidly focus on the performances of the AQGs and results of the comparisons.