Super Conducting Gravimeter

REVIEW OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS
VOLUME 70, NUMBER 11
NOVEMBER 1999
REVIEW ARTICLE The superconducting gravimeter

John M. Goodkinda)
Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0319
Received 13 April 1999; accepted for publication 28 June 1999 The superconducting gravimeter is a spring type gravimeter in which the mechanical spring is replaced by a magnetic levitation of a superconducting sphere in the eld of superconducting, persistent current coils. The object is to utilize the perfect stability of supercurrents to create a perfectly stable spring. The magnetic levitation is designed to provide independent adjustment of the total levitating force and the force gradient so that it can support the full weight of the sphere and still yield a large displacement for a small change in gravity. The gravimeters provide unequaled long term stability so that instrumental noise can be either below geophysical and cultural noise or indistinguishable from it over periods ranging from years to minutes. This article reviews the construction and operating characteristics of the instruments, and the range of research problems to which it has been and can be applied. Support for operation of the instruments in the United States has been limited so that operation of multiple instruments for periods much longer than a year has not been possible. However, some of the most appropriate applications of the instrument will require records of several years from arrays of instruments. Commercial versions of the instruments have now been purchased in sufcient numbers elsewhere in the world so that a world-wide array has been organized to maintain instruments and share data over a period of six years. 1999 American Institute of Physics. S0034-6748 99 00111-2
I. INTRODUCTION
Gravity meters are devices which measure slow variations in gravitational force or acceleration. They differ from accelerometers or seismographs in that they are designed to operate at lower frequencies with lower noise levels. Data from gravimeters are typically obtained at frequencies below about 0.1 Hz. Ideally they would provide instrumental noise levels below ambient geophysical noise at arbitrarily low frequencies and this was the objective in developing the superconducting gravimeter SG . In circumstances where environmental inuences on gravity have been well accounted for, the best records from SG have shown gravity variations over a year of the order of 1 gal (1 gal 1 cm/s2 10 3 g). Gravity at the surface of the earth changes by about 1 gal for a vertical displacement of 3 mm. For periodic signals, the SG provides uniquely low noise from periods of a few thousand seconds to the monthly and annual solid earth tides and the Chandler wobble 1 cycle/434 days . Measurements of the diurnal and semidiurnal earth tides with a year long record yield amplitudes at the various frequencies to within 10 3 gal 10 12 g). The resolution available with the instrument has provided new information for geophysics and fundamental gravity studies. With increasing numbers of the instruments distributed around the globe and with some loa
cated to study specic problems, new elds of research and new discoveries are likely to appear during the coming decade. Section II of this article describes the physical principles and practical realization of the device along with some of the ancillary equipment that is required to make it work. Section III describes procedures for setting up and operating the instruments. Section IV describes a range of geophysics and physics problems to which the unique capabilities of the instrument have been applied. Section V describes the performance achieved by the SG and compares the characteristics of the two other types of gravimeters currently in widespread use. It is suggested how their combined use would provide more information than any of them used alone. Section VI speculates about possible future applications of high resolution gravimetry.
II. PRINCIPLES OF OPERATION AND INSTRUMENTATION
Electronic mail: jgoodkind@ucsd.edu 4131
All gravimeters other than the early pendulum types and the absolute meter see Sec. V , use the equivalent of a mass on a spring. The spring must provide an upward force equal to the time averaged value of the downward force of gravity. Small changes in gravity are measured through the extension of the spring or the resulting changes of position of the mass relative to the support structure. As will be discussed below, much of the work that has been done or is anticipated for the SG requires measurement precision of at least 1 gal so that
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Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999
John M. Goodkind
FIG. 1. Diagram of the cryogenic portion of the superconducting gravimeter.
the upward force of the spring must be stable to at least one part in 109 . Mechanical spring type gravimeters have not achieved this stability. The SG was conceived to make use of the, in principle, perfect stability of superconducting persistent currents to provide a perfectly stable magnetic suspension. The fundamental design of the gravimeter has not changed since it was rst reported in the Review of Scientic Instruments nearly 30 years ago.1 However, modications that have yielded improvements in performance were actively developed in this laboratory at the University of California San Diego UCSD until 1990 and are continuing for commercially available instruments at GWR Instruments.2 The design of the instrument is illustrated in Fig. 1. A diagram of a recently developed dual sensor instrument3 is shown in Fig. 2. Its purpose will be described in Sec. V.
A. Superconducting levitation
The basic element of the device is a superconducting sphere suspended in the magnetic eld gradient generated by a pair of superconducting coils with persistent current switches. That is, the coils are shorted with a superconducting shunt after a current is established so that the current is permanently trapped as long as the superconductor remains at temperatures below its critical temperature, T c . The method for trapping the current is standard for superconducting magnets. A voltage is applied to a heater to raise the temperature of the shunt above T c . Current is then applied to the coil to generate the desired magnetic eld. When the desired eld is reached the heater voltage is removed so that the shunt becomes superconducting. Then the current from the external supply is reduced to zero and disconnected, leaving the original current owing in the coil and the shunt. In order to minimize heat input that evaporates liquid helium, the current leads between room temperature and liquid helium temperature are connected through a plug located in the liquid helium. Once the current is trapped in the coils, the
FIG. 2. Diagram of the dual sensor superconducting gravimeter developed and produced by GWR Instruments. Extra coils are added to trim the null positions of each sensor to provide the same tilt sensitivity.
leads are unplugged and removed from the cryostat. In practice, the precision required for adjusting the currents is greater than can easily be achieved by this simple procedure. Therefore short pulses are applied to the heaters with the external current close to the desired value as described in Sec. III. The levitation force is due to the interaction between the inhomogeneous magnetic eld from the coils and the currents induced by it in the superconducting sphere. The effect does not depend on the Meisner effect4 of superconductors in which magnetic eld is excluded from the interior of a su-
Superconducting gravimeter
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FIG. 3. Levitating force as a function of position of the sphere relative to the plane of the upper coil. The force gradient is the slope of the curve and can be adjusted arbitrarily close to zero by adjusting the ratio of the currents in the two coils. The ratios of the upper coil currents to lower coil currents for the three curves are 0.870, 0.884, - - - 0.892 and the corresponding force gradients are 1.1 10 3 , 5.1 10 4 , 1.3 4 10 N/m. The instruments are operated with a force gradient between 10 3 and 10 4 N/m.
perconductor even if it becomes superconducting while in a magnetic eld. Rather it depends only on the zero resistance property of superconductors so that the Faraday induction law guarantees that ux is excluded from inside of the sphere if a eld is applied after the sphere becomes superconducting. The levitation force on the sphere is proportional to the product of the eld and the eld gradient produced by the coils. Two coils, close to the Helmholtz conguration along a vertical axis are used and the sphere is levitated just above the plane of the upper coil. In this way the levitating force and the force gradient can be adjusted independently so that with the sphere levitated at its desired location, the restoring force for departures from that position can be adjusted as close as desired to zero. This would be equivalent to an innitely long spring. In practice there is an optimal range for the force gradient which is discussed in Sec. III. A qualitative description of the levitating force as a function of position for various ratios of currents in the two coils is provided in Ref. 1 along with measurements made with an ac analog of the superconducting device. Computations of the force on a superconducting sphere in an arbitrary magnetic eld can be performed using spherical harmonics5 or nite element numerical methods.6 For the case of axial symmetry, without the magnetic shield, it can be computed using the method of images.7 Figure 3 shows the force, computed by
the nite element method, as a function of position of the sphere along the axis relative to the plane of the upper coil for three different current ratios in the two coils. Some experimental gravimeters constructed at GWR xed the force gradient permanently by winding the two coils with the appropriate turns ratio so that the same current passed through both connected in series would yield the desired gradient. This would simplify the levitation procedure and therefore shorten the time required for setup. However, long term stability and other characteristics of this arrangement have not been adequately tested. In the initial development of the instrument NbTi alloy wire was used for the coils to take advantage of its high critical current and strong ux pinning. Contrary to expectations it was found to allow ux creep such that the eld would initially decay at a few parts in 109 per day. Consequently, pure Nb wire has been used on all instruments since it does not exhibit this ux creep at the elds and currents required. In addition to the main current carrying coils it was found, in the earliest work, that independent single layer windings on the same form, underneath the main coils, reduced the temperature dependence of the levitation eld Sec. II D . These stabilizing coils also include a persistent switch so that the switches can be opened heated when the currents through the main coils are created. In this way the stabilizing coils initially carry no current and are under no magnetic stress. Very small currents are subsequently induced in the stabilizing coils if there are correspondingly small changes in the ux through the current carrying coils. These induced currents then cancel the change of magnetic eld which would occur without them but, because the changes are small, the magnetic pressure is small, and there is no decay due to ux creep. For the same reason they also reduce the temperature dependence of the total eld. In the earliest work the gravimeter was not thermally isolated from the liquid helium bath1 and had many other design features that were less exacting than the rst eld instruments. Recent tests at GWR have remeasured the shielding factor provided by these coils8 against temperature changes and current changes in the main coils and found that the coils may no longer be necessary. Mechanical stability is essential for the windings of the coil and their position relative to the position detection system of the sphere. Displacements of the sphere as small as 10 10 cm are detected so that displacements of this order in the structure can lead to spurious signals. For this reason the coils are tightly layer wound in a form machined into a solid copper block which also houses the detection system see Fig. 1 . The coil windings are further secured either by winding a layer of nylon monoliment on top of the coil or by bonding the windings with epoxy. The sphere is hollow so as to reduce its weight and thus reduce the magnetic eld required for levitation. The eld required with solid spheres, of this diameter, is greater than the lower critical eld4 (Hc1 ) so that ux will creep into the sphere and it will drop. With the hollow spheres the maximum eld on their surfaces is between 0.025 and 0.04 T for masses between 4 and 8 g. This is well below Hc1 0.13 T for Nb at the gravimeter operating temperature. A variety of fabrication techniques have been used to make the spheres.
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FIG. 4. Circuit diagram for the capacitance bridge displacement detection for UCSD gravimeters. The components on the left side are located inside of the cryostat. The components on the right side are located on top of the cryostat at room temperature.
The earliest versions plated Pb onto thin walled, hollow aluminum spheres. These would deteriorate in time if left at room temperature due to continued oxidation of the Pb. Current instruments use Nb spheres. For the UCSD gravimeters a high temperature salt bath was used to electroplate9 Nb onto precision ground,10 solid steel spheres. The steel was then chemically dissolved through the small hole left after removing the copper rod which supported and provided a conducting path to the sphere in the bath. A small hole in the nished sphere is desirable since it eliminates the change of stress that would occur on a sealed sphere due to condensation of the air trapped inside of it when cooled to cryogenic temperatures. It also reduces the bouyant effect of the helium gas around the sphere by about an order of magnitude. In the commercial instruments, two thin walled hemispheres of Nb are machined, e-beam welded, and nally ground to yield an accurate sphere. Chemical vapor deposition was also tested for the manufacture of the commercial instruments but provided no advantages and was more costly. Accurate sphericity of the outer surface guarantees that the levitating force will not depend on orientation of the sphere relative to the coil axis so that they have been ground spherical to within at least 3 m. Departure of the inner and outer surfaces from concentricity is actually desirable since it is used to maintain the sphere at xed orientation with the small hole on top where the magnetic eld is minimum. The spheres determine the ultimate size of the instrument and almost all of the instruments have used 2.54 cm diameter. Their mass has ranged between 4 and 8 g with no clear difference in performance within this range. Attempts to make smaller instruments by using smaller spheres resulted in greater sensitivity to ground noise and poorer signal-tonoise over the entire spectrum. This was rst discovered at UCSD when an instrument was built using a 6.35-mm-diam sphere and it is probably responsible for the higher noise
level of an instrument built at GWR using a 1.27-cm-diam sphere.11 The reason for this is apparently that the horizontal ground motions remain the same but a given horizontal displacement is a bigger fraction of the sphere diameter and spacing between the sphere and the capacitor plates. Consequently, a given horizontal displacement leads to a larger apparent vertical displacement. Conversely, this implies that still larger spheres would yield instruments less sensitive to ground noise. Alternatively, the addition of constraints of the horizontal motion of the sphere would accomplish the same thing and will be mentioned later in another context. The electronic component for the levitation procedure is a dual current supply capable of delivering the required 4 to 6 A for each coil. Panel meters are included to conrm the settings of the current control knobs. In addition it includes two pulse generators for the persistent switch heaters, each of which generates one pulse per second. The voltage and duration of the pulses are adjustable from the front panel. Four, normally open, momentary switches are used to apply the pulses to the heaters for the two coils and their two stabilizing coils so that the operator can easily control the number of pulses applied. This provides an additional control on the total energy input to the heaters.
B. Position detection and feedback
Once the sphere is levitated and the gradient adjusted, the sphere will move relative to the coils in response to local gravity changes. This displacement is measured as an unbalance of the capacitance bridge formed by the three plates and the sphere as shown schematically in Fig. 4. The plates are machined to form the interior of a sphere, 1 mm larger radius than, and enclosing the levitated sphere. The plates are constructed by bonding cylindrical bars and rings of aluminum together with epoxy which serves as insulation between the
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FIG. 5. Photograph of the two halves of the capacitor plate assembly with a sphere placed in the upper half. The top half is bolted to the top of the cavity in the copper block of Fig. 1. The large clearance holes allow the bolt head to touch the upper ground ring without touching the ring plate. The lower half is then bolted to the upper half using the small threaded holes in the upper half of the ring plate. The lower half of the assembly has clearance holes through its ground ring.
FIG. 6. Photograph of the ange on top of the Dewar of the UCSD gravimeters showing the room temperature portion of the capacitance bridge preamplier, the pump out, and valve for the vacuum can, cables, and feed throughs for all other wiring. The small openings are for the liquid helium transfer tube, the magnet plug for applying the current to the levitating coils during setup. The large opening at the center is for the closed cycle refrigerator placed as illustrated in Fig. 8.
nished capacitor plates and between the plates and grounded rings shielding the center plate from the end plates. Then hemispherical cavities are machined into the pieces. The mating surfaces of the two halves are machined to t tightly into each other and to align accurately along the axis of the cylinder. Half of the center ring plate is on each piece. The outer diameter of the assembly is machined into a cylinder to t into the cavity of the copper block on which the coils are wound. The two halves of a capacitor assembly, along with a 2.54 cm sphere in the upper half are shown in Fig. 5. Clearance holes, countersunk for screw heads, are drilled through the upper half of the ring plate for the bolts which secure the assembly to the top of the cavity in the copper block Fig. 1 . The lower half has similar clearance holes for bolts to attach the lower half to the upper half. Copper rods, threaded at one end, are screwed into blind tapped holes on the top of the center plate and ring plate to serve as the center lead of rigid coax cables. The outer conductor of these coaxes is formed by holes drilled the length of the copper block. The copper rods protrude through tubes soldered into the top of the copper block. The rods are then sealed, vacuum tight, to the block using Stycast 2850 epoxy. A third hole and rod through the copper block forms the coax cable to the lower plate which is connected by a lead between the end of the rod and a terminal screwed into the center of the lower plate. The sphere is placed in the lower half of the assembly before the lower half is bolted in place. A copper plate covers the bottom of the cavity and is sealed vacuum tight with an indium O ring. An annealed copper capillary tube is soldered into this plate to allow evacuation of the cavity and backlling with helium gas. After backlling the copper tube is pinched off. To further ensure that the helium does not leak from the cavity the seam of the pinch-off is covered with epoxy or soldered with indium. The optimal signal-to-noise ratio for the bridge is obtained by operating at about 1 kHz. Cables that run from
room temperature at the top of the Dewar to 4.2 K at the top of the vacuum can are subjected to changing temperature gradients as the liquid helium level changes and changing pressure since the Dewar is vented to the atmosphere. Tests at UCSD with a sphere rigidly clamped in the center position indicated that this was a measurable source of noise in the capacitance bridge. In order to eliminate this problem, the UCSD gravimeters place the bridge transformer and a cryogenic preamplier in the liquid helium on top of the vacuum can Fig. 4 . In this way low impedances are presented to the cables so that the signals are not effected by small changes of the high capacitive impedances of the cables. The drive signal for the bridge is generated by the internal oscillator of a lock-in amplier and the output of the preamplier is connected to the input of the lock-in. This provides the signalto-noise advantage of the lock-in and the sign reversal of the output with sphere position above or below null as required for feedback. The normal range of force gradients used are such that electronic noise from the bridge as measured with the clamped sphere is much less than the signal generated by mechanical noise with the sphere oating. The cryogenic portion of the preamplier is shown on the left side of the circuit diagram of Fig. 4. The room temperature portion of the circuit is shown on the right side of the diagram and is placed on the top plate of the cryostat. Figure 6 is a photograph of this plate, bolted to the ange of the Dewar. The photo shows the box containing the preamplier with cables clamped by the lid, a second box that clamps additional cables on the opposite side, the pumping line to evacuate the vacuum can, the openings for the liquid helium transfer tube, a vent tube, and a large opening in which a closed cycle refrigerator is inserted Sec. II F . The gravimeter is operated in feedback so that the sphere remains in a position that nulls the capacitance bridge. Feedback provides the usual advantages of increased linear dynamic range and rapid response relative to open loop operation. An additional advantage of holding the sphere in the null position of the bridge is that the mechanical force from
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1 0A 4V dc V . 2 d/2 2
FIG. 7. Circuit diagram for electrostatic feedback. The center tap of the transformer is ac 1 kHz ground for the capacitance bridge position detection but not at dc ground. The slowly varying feedback signal is dc coupled to the center tap through the bias batteries. The ring plate is maintained at dc ground.
the 1 kHz sensing eld is null. This can be seen by considering the sphere as the center at plate capacitively coupled to the ring plate between two other parallel plates so that the force on the center plate due to a voltage, V, applied to the end plates with the center plate at ac ground is given by F 1 2
2 0 AV drive
1 d x
2
1 . x2
Here A is the area of all of the plates, d, is the separation between the end plates, and x is the variable distance between the center plate and one end plate. For the sphere centered, x d/2 and this force is zero, so that relatively large bridge drive voltages can be applied without applying a voltage dependent force. In practice a bridge drive of 10 V peak-to-peak is used. The feedback force can be generated either by a low pass ltered voltage, dc coupled to the capacitor plates or by a current applied to a 5 turn superconducting coil wound on the copper block below the position of the sphere Fig. 1 . The capacitance bridge plates are wired so as to allow the application of an electrostatic force but this is normally used only to monitor the force gradient during setup or for a relative calibration of the instrument after setup. It is implemented as shown in Fig. 7. Equal and opposite xed potentials are applied to the top and bottom plates and the feedback voltage is applied at their common connection point. The effect of this is to vary the potential difference between the top and ring plates relative to that between the bottom and ring plates, or equivalently, to apply a variable potential to the ring plate. It was found empirically in the early work at UCSD that the magnetic feedback is inherently very linear whereas the electrostatic feedback requires careful balancing of the bridge to both ac and dc potentials.12,13 The reason for this is that for xed potential, V dc , and a feedback voltage of V, the equation for the force on the sphere becomes F 1 2
0A
However, the null of the capacitance bridge for the 1 kHz signal can occur for the sphere at a different position than that for which there is no force with V 0. This is due to stray reactive impedances in the bridge circuit. In that case, when the ac bridge is nulled, x d/2 and the terms quadratic in V of Eq. 2 will not cancel. For a variety of reasons, V cannot be very much less than V dc so that the quadratic terms can be non-negligible. Thus, it is necessary to trim the capacitance bridge so that the null for detection occurs at the same position of the sphere as the null for the force with V 0. Magnetic feedback, on the other hand, is highly linear and is automatically nulled when the bridge output is zero. The force in this case is given by, F aIi bii, where I is the current induced in the sphere by the levitation eld and i is the current induced by the feedback eld. Since i/I is at most the ratio of the tide forces to g, i/I 10 7 whereas a and b are of the same order of magnitude, the second term is negligible for any measurable signal. Thus, during normal operation, magnetic feedback is used. The output voltage of the lock-in amplier is fed back to the current loop through an integrator and a stable resistor which determines the feedback factor . Magnetic ux detectors called superconducting quantum interference devices SQUIDs are used in other applications to detect very small displacements14 and can be used in the SG as well. They have been used at different stages of the development of the SG for diagnostic purposes but are more complicated and expensive. Since they measure changes in magnetic ux, and not uniquely the position of the sphere, magnetic feedback could not be used with SQUID detection. They are used with a superconducting transformer with one loop placed underneath and close to the sphere and the other around the SQUID at some location shielded from the levitation eld. As the sphere moves relative to the transformer loop, in the levitation eld, it changes the ux through the loop and therefore the current through the entire circuit. This is measured as a ux change by the SQUID. It was used to test for stability of the magnetic eld when the sphere was removed, when it was mechanically clamped, and when it was held in xed position by electrostatic feedback. It was also used to measure the shielding effect of the stabilizing coils. The fundamental choice that has been made in the design of the SG is to use a weak restoring force so that relatively large displacements result from small changes in gravity. As a consequence, the sensitivity of the capacitance bridge displacement measurement is more than adequate. By contrast, detectors that were developed for gravity wave antennas14 and used in a gravity gradiometer15 measure much smaller displacements in very stiff restoring forces.
C. Magnetic shielding
V dc V d x 2
V dc x2
For the sphere on center so that x d/2, this reduces to a force linear in V
Since the levitation is magnetic, stray magnetic elds would cause the sphere to move and yield a false gravity signal. Magnetic shielding is provided by a superconducting
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cylinder with hemispherical closure on one end see Fig. 1 and by a metal can outside of the vacuum can. The metal shield reduces the magnetic eld of the earth so as to minimize the amount of ux trapped in all of the superconducting elements. The metal is demagnetized in situ just prior to cooling the instrument to liquid helium temperature. This reduces the eld on the superconducting shield to a few times 10 7 T. The superconducting shield prevents any changes in the environmental magnetic eld from changing the eld on the levitated sphere. The effectiveness of this shielding is improved by eliminating trapped ux through the use of the metal. The superconducting shields for the UCSD gravimeters were made by plating Pb onto copper. The copper pieces were electroformed onto a stainless steel mandril of the desired shape. The shield is mechanically and thermally attached to the copper block with bolts around the circumference, near the top of the block, and with a single bolt through the center at the bottom. In this way the shield is thermally and mechanically anchored to the copper block which is temperature regulated and it cannot move relative to the coils. The commercial gravimeters use welded Nb shields which are also attached to the copper block as described.
D. Temperature control
link is regulated so that if there are no other heat leaks between the copper block and the liquid helium, the entire block should be regulated independent of the temperature of the liquid helium bath. The liquid helium bath is vented to the atmosphere through a narrow tube so that it is always slightly above atmospheric pressure but varies with the atmosphere. For this reason residual helium gas in the vacuum can must be at very low pressure so that temperature variations of the bath are not transmitted to the lower portions of the copper block. If 4 He exchange gas is placed in the vacuum can for the initial cool down, it is pumped after cool down with a diffusion pump or cryopump until a helium mass spectrometer leak detector at its highest sensitivity can barely detect the presence of the gas. If hydrogen exchange gas is used, then no pumping is required and the hydrogen atoms are all adsorbed on the walls at the 4.2 K operating temperature. The copper used for the block is 99.999% pure so that it will have the highest possible thermal conductivity. This minimizes changes of temperature gradients along the block which result from weak thermal exchange between the block and the walls of the vacuum can, due to radiation or residual He gas.
E. Tilt control
The effective diameters of the sphere, the coil windings, and the superconducting shields depend on temperature through the temperature dependence of the superconducting penetration depth. In fact, the dependence that was measured in the early development was about an order of magnitude larger than what one would calculate from the known penetration depth for a smooth surface. It was assumed to arise from the fact that the relevant surfaces are rough on the microscopic scale so that the effective penetration depth is greater then that measured in ideal circumstances. This was later conrmed by explicit measurements of the effect.16,17 Consequently the levitating force varies with temperature by roughly 10 gal/mK. An additional temperature dependence can arise from the paramagnetism of the copper block and other materials inside of the superconducting shield but this is apparently smaller than the penetration depth effect. For this reason the copper block is thermally isolated in a vacuum chamber with weak thermal contact to the liquid helium bath through the stainless steel collar Fig. 1 and is electronically regulated to within a few K. The temperature is measured using a doped Ge thermometer resistor18 as one arm of a Wheatstone bridge. The other three arms are wirewound xed resistors whose values are chosen so that the bridge will balance when the temperature is at about 0.1 K above the liquid helium bath. All four resistors are located in the cryogenic environment, inside of the vacuum can so as to eliminate any inuence of changing cable impedances on the bridge balance. Standard techniques of lock-in detection and feedback to a heater are used for the rest of the control system. The thermometer resistor is in thermal contact with the top of the copper block close to the control heater. In this manner the temperature of a point close to the weak thermal
An ideal gravimeter would respond only to forces along its axis and would be perfectly rigid or have innite restoring force perpendicular to its axis. If its axis were not aligned with the vertical then it would respond to the component of gravity along its axis so that the apparent acceleration due to gravity would be g apparent g cos , there where is the angle between the vertical and the axis of the instrument. Horizontal accelerations, a horizontal will also have a component along the instrument axis given by a horizontal sin which will therefore also contribute to g apparent if 0. The restoring force in the direction perpendicular to the axis of the SG under normal operating conditions is several hundred times larger than in the vertical direction but nite. If the instrument is tilted the sphere moves off of the axis of the instrument. For a given tilt angle, the levitating force along the axis of the instrument decreases, as the sphere moves off center, by more than the component of gravity along the axis decreases. Consequently, the sphere passes over a high point when 0. The apparent force displacement of the sphere along the axis has the same dependence on tilt angle as an ideal device but with the opposite sign, so that the apparent change in gravity, g g(1 cos ) g( 2/2). If articial signals due to tilt are to be less than 10 12 g then the tilt must be maintained within 1.4 rad. Large scale geophysical tilts are of this order but local tilts due to changes in temperature, ground water, or cultural effects can be much larger. Changing temperature gradients in the neck of the Dewar can cause tilting of its inner wall and therfore of the gravimeter. For this reason, two pendulum type tiltmeters with their sensitive axes aligned along orthogonal axes, are mounted directly on top of the gravimeter vacuum can, in the liquid helium. In principle, the signals from these tiltmeters could be used to correct the gravity signal. In practice, because of the quadratic dependence on , this would be pos-
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FIG. 8. Diagram of the system supported from a frame on top of a cement wall pier. In this design the tilt control points were at two corners of an isosceles right triangle so that the tilt controllers operated along orthogonal directions.
FIG. 9. Photograph of the complete system of the current model GWR gravimeter. The compressor and cooling water system for the refrigerator is on the right. The refrigerator is mounted on its own stand and is mechanically isolated from the Dewar. The expansion devices for tilt feedback are placed directly on the oor underneath the micrometer heads which are attached to a band around the center of the Dewar. This arrangement leads to less coupling of horizontal accelerations into the gravity signal. In this arrangement the tilt control points are at the corners of an equilateral triangle so that the tilt control axes are not orthogonal.
sible only if the gravimeter and tiltmeters were exactly 0. In aligned so that the tiltmeter nulls corresponded to addition the tiltmeters would need to be linear. These conditions are difcult to meet so that active feedback of the tilt signals is used to hold the alignment of the gravimeter constant. A variety of displacement transducers can be used for the purpose so long as they can translate over a distance of order 1 mm. Thermal expansion devices of various designs ranging from solid bars of aluminum to bellows lled with high thermal expansion coefcient oil have been used. For most of the instruments, the Dewar containing the gravimeter is bolted to a metal frame supported at three points in a horizontal plane as indicated in Fig. 8. Variation of the elevation of two of the points varies the tilt along orthogonal directions parallel to the directions measured by the tiltmeters. Micrometer screws at these positions are used for initial alignment along the vertical prior to placing the system in feedback. The transducers for automatic tilt control are placed under the micrometers, on a concrete block pier. Current versions of the commercial instruments have replaced the metal frame with a band around the Dewar as shown in Fig. 9 so that the transducers can be placed directly on the oor and there is no need to construct a pier. This version appears to respond less to the horizontal accelerations of ground noise.
F. Cryostat design
The SG, as any equipment that operates at liquid helium temperature, requires a support structure, electrical wiring, and vacuum pumping lines that extend from room temperature to 4.2 K. In order to minimize the heat conduction between these temperatures, and therefore minimize consumption of liquid helium, they must be made of materials which
are poor thermal conductors and of sufcient length and small cross section to reduce the total heat input to the helium bath to less than 100 mW. The UCSD gravimeters are supported from the top by thin-walled stainless steel tubes which also double as a pumping tube for the vacuum can and as rf shielding for cables. Vibrational modes of this support structure can degrade performance of the instrument if they occur at inopportune frequencies. For this reason, the gravimeters take advantage of the relatively stiff and massive inner wall of the Dewar by pressing the cryostat against the bottom of the Dewar in addition to bolting it to the top ange. The early UCSD and GWR gravimeters used a stiff bellows as a spring attached to the bottom of the metal shield to make contact at the bottom Fig. 8 . Current UCSD instruments use a solid aluminum cone pressed against the aluminum bottom inside wall of the Dewar by the weight of the gravimeter. The stainless steel support tubes connect to the top plate of the cryostat through a slip joint that allows a small vertical displacement so that the cryostat is not under compression when the plate is bolted in place. The current commercial models have eliminated the support structure and some of its heat leak by building the gravimeter into the Dewar, rigidly attached to its inner wall. Since long term, undisturbed operation of gravimeters is important for the type of data that they obtain, the total heat leak into the Dewar must be minimized so that the time between transfers of liquid helium is maximized. For this purpose all of the instruments currently incorporate closed cycle refrigerators which provide 1 W of cooling power at 10 K recent models at 6.5 K so as to absorb most of the heat owing in from room temperature.19 In this manner the current commercial instruments run for more than a year between transfers. The Dewars for the UCSD gravimeters were purchased before reliable refrigerators were available at affordable prices. The cryostat support structure was revised to accept refrigerators in these Dewars during the late 1980s.
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vantage of all of the refrigerators for eld operation is that they require about 2 kW of power. The 4.2 K machines require 3 or 4 kW but this requirement could be reduced if there is sufcient economic motivation for manufacturers to undertake the development effort. New developments, such as the pulse tube refrigerator,20,21 which have no moving parts, could lead to gravimeters and other cryogenic devices that can operate indenitely in the eld with maintenance intervals of several years. They would also eliminate or substantially reduce the need for mechanical isolation. The rst commercial pulse tube refrigerator to run at 4.2 K has become available this year.22
G. An undesirable degree of freedom
FIG. 10. Drawing showing the placement of the closed cycle refrigerator in the neck of the Dewar of a GWR gravimeter.
This is accomplished by leaving an opening through the lid of the cryostat that allows insertion of the refrigerator into the neck of the Dewar with the gravimeter in place and in operation as shown in Fig. 6. A mechanical diagram showing the placement of the refrigerator in the Dewar neck of the commercial instruments is shown in Fig. 10. The heat leaking into the Dewar through the neck is transferred to the refrigerator through the helium gas and the copper heat exchange plates. This arrangement allows removal or replacement of the refrigerator for servicing without interrupting operation of the gravimeter. All of the current refrigerators operate on the Gifford MacMahon cycle which employs a reciprocating piston so that they generate mechanical vibrations ranging from frequencies of 2 Hz up to hundreds of Hz. Consequently the systems must be constructed so as to include vibration isolation of the refrigerator from the gravimeter. The refrigerator is suspended from an independent frame which is vibration isolated from the oor or the gravimeter pier. The refrigerator is aligned in the opening to the cryostat so that it does not touch Fig. 10 . The opening into the Dewar around the refrigerator is sealed by a rubber diaphragm. Refrigerators are also manufactured which operate at 4 K so that, in principle it would never be necessary to transfer liquid helium in the eld. Two systems incorporating these refrigerators have been delivered by GWR and one has been operating for ve months without loss of liquid helium. The necessary time between preventive maintenance of these refrigerators is not yet well established but there is reason to expect them to run for as long as four years. A major disad-
As stated above, the restoring force in the horizontal direction is nite so that the sphere can move in the horizontal direction as well as the vertical. Due to the near cylindrical symmetry, this means that the center of mass can move in an orbit around the stable equilibrium point. A normal mode of the system is indeed excited by tilting the instrument. Evidence that it is this orbital motion, rather than a pure rotation of the sphere about its axis, is provided by the fact that the viscous damping of the mode by helium gas is too large to be explained by a pure rotation. Due to slight asymmetries in the levitation and detection systems, there is a small apparent or real vertical displacement associated with this motion. The period of this mode can be decreased from close to 1 h to less than a few seconds by trapping magnetic ux in the sphere and then applying a small magnetic feild, both in the horizontal plane. This is done by deliberately applying a small magnetic eld to the sphere, while it cools through the superconducting transition using some small coils glued onto the copper block. These same coils are then used to apply a eld, during operation, so as to break the cylindrical symmetry. The damping of the mode is also increased by increasing the amount of ux trapped in the sphere since the moving sphere then induces eddy currents in the capacitor plates. The damping of the mode is also increased by viscous damping of helium gas sealed into the cavity with the sphere. The cavity in the copper block is sealed at room temperature with helium gas at a pressure of 1 atmosphere or less. With no gas in the chamber, the Q of the mode is several thousand so that it is always excited and the instrument is not usable. By contrast, the vertical mode, which is the useful degree of freedom, is heavily overdamped under normal operation conditions and has a period of about 5 s.
H. Electronic and digital ltering
Although the SG provides unique signal-to-noise only at frequencies below about 10 3 Hz, optimal data can be obtained only if data is sampled at least every 10 s. This is because there are undesirable high frequency components to the signal that result from environmental, cultural, or instrumental events. These can be in the form of rapid spikes or sudden offsets of the signal which are not of interest to investigators using the gravimeters and must be removed from the records so as not to degrade the long term signals that are
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of interest. This can be done with greater precision and less inuence on the long term data, by removing these artifacts from data sampled at the higher rates. Some investigators sample at 1 s intervals so that the electronic antialiasing prelter can then use a time constant as short as 2 s. Shorter time constant lters use smaller capacitors which are likely to be more stable than large ones. For tidal analysis and measurement of secular changes in gravity these records would normally be digitally ltered and decimated to 10 min or hourly samples. The UCSD gravimeters sampled and recorded at 10 s intervals with 20 s Butterworth prelters. In addition the data acquisition software included a real time, symmetric digital lter to record at 2 min intervals. This allowed relatively high resolution real time monitoring of the data. In order to compare signals from different instruments it is important that gain and phase shift as a function of frequency of the antialiasing lters be identical. Specications for this lter have been agreed upon by the participants in the Global Geodynamics Project23 GGP , discussed in Sec. IV, and are available on the Web page for that organization. However, the force gradient of the gravimeter, and therefore its intrinsic response time, can be adjusted over a wide range. The force gradient must be set sufciently weak to provide sufcient open loop electromechanical gain, A, so that geo1, but not so physical noise dominates the signal and A weak that the closed loop time constant is comparable to the antialiasing lter. If the latter were the case then the gain and phase shift of the data from various instruments would not be the same even with well matched electronic lters. In practice the necessary conditions are well satised over the range of force gradients that have been used.
I. r shielding and temperature control
record can yield amplitudes of the various tidal frequencies to within about 10 3 gal so that it would be desirable to have resolution of better than one part in 3 105 of full scale. In practice, high quality digital voltmeters can provide six decimal digits of resolution but their specied long term stability is no greater than 16 bits. All work with the UCSD instruments thus far has been done with 16 bit A/D boards which plug into the computer bus. Users of GWR gravimeters have used bench top commercial digital voltmeters. In contrast to most laboratory experiments, timing of the data acquisition must be at accurate universal times, not simply even intervals. Analysis of tide signals or their removal from the data to reveal other gravity variations requires that the universal time of the data points be known to within about 1 s. A shift of less than 5 s in the absolute time of a year long record can lead to differences in the best t tidal amplitudes that are greater than the uncertainty due to geophysical noise. A variety of methods have been used to synchronize the computer system clock with UT in the eld. The UCSD data systems at one time used commercial plug-in boards to receive the time signal from the radio broadcast station, WWV, of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology NIST . More recently a plug-in GPS receiver was found to be much more reliable and is useful worldwide. Both systems require an outdoor antenna. In either case the PC system clock was automatically updated from the plug-in board whenever the difference between them reached one second.
III. SETUP PROCEDURES AND OPERATION
Although the electronic components all operate only at audio frequencies or dc, early experience demonstrated that rf interference from local radio broadcasts could degrade the data. In addition, it was found that a measurable dependence of the system on room temperature resulted entirely from temperature dependence of the electronics. Consequently, the electronics for the UCSD instrument, SGB, were placed inside of an r shielded enclosure which is also insulated and temperature regulated at 33 C. All of the cables leading into the cryostat from the r enclosure pass through braided cable shielding that is grounded to both the enclosure and the Dewar.
J. Data acquisition
Starting a gravimeter with the resolution of the SG is not as simple as throwing a switch. There are a few well dened procedures which must be followed, some are peculiar to the SG and some would be required of any gravimeter with comparable precision.
A. Cool down and levitation
The largest temporal variations of gravity are from the tides and they are approximately 300 gal peak-to-peak at mid latitudes. Short term noise at quiet locations can be as small as 0.1 gal so that an analog-to-digital A/D converter with resolution of 1 part in 3 103 12 bits might seem adequate. However, to prevent the signal from exceeding full scale of the A/D in the event of offsets from earthquakes or other disturbances, the instruments are usually run so that the tides are no more than 1/2 of full scale. Thus a 12 bit A/D converter is not quite adequate. Analysis of a year long
In order to optimize the magnetic shielding, the metal shield is demagnetized after the instrument is installed at its operating location and before the system is cooled below the superconducting transition temperature. When the instrument has cooled to liquid helium temperature, the currents in the coils are increased in steps until the sphere levitates. The drive voltage and gain of the capacitance bridge are both set 100 to 1000 times lower than for the operating conditions so that it can be used to monitor the sphere position over the entire range of its motion. With the sphere always levitated close to its centered position the force gradient is then decreased by successively reducing the current in the lower coil and increasing the current in the upper one. As the force gradient is decreased, the displacement of the sphere for a given change in current becomes greater so that increasingly ne adjustments are needed. This is accomplished by decreasing the power in the pulses applied to the persistent switch heaters and by setting the power supply current successively closer to the nal desired current. The current in either coil is increased or decreased by setting the supply current respectively higher or lower than the trapped current
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and pulsing the heaters. The decrease in the force gradient is qualitatively evident since the time constant for the sphere to approach its equilibrium position increases with decreasing force gradient. Gravimeters have been operated with this intrinsic time constant as long as 30 s. In the initial levitation all four heaters are pulsed simultaneously but for nal centering of the sphere it is easier to adjust only the current in the lower coil. The position is less sensitive to current changes in the lower coil and, for small changes, this adjusts the position of the sphere with little effect on the force gradient. When the currents are adjusted to the desired values the current from the external supply is turned off. This causes a small displacement of the sphere since the persistent current after the external supply is removed is not exactly the same as the the current through the coil when current is still owing from the supply. It is then recentered by turning the current on again and readjusting the position of the sphere to be offset by the same amount but in the opposite direction to the shift caused by turning off the current.
B. Tilt adjustment
placement of an oil separator once a year. Every two years the refrigerator must be removed for preventive maintenance which can be done without interrupting the operation of the gravimeter. The most efcient procedure is to swap the refrigerator with one that has been serviced. The UCSD instruments use 160 liter Dewars and require lling every four months. Current commercial instruments are built into smaller, more efcient Dewars as discussed above. These instruments can run for more than one year between rells with liquid helium. They also are mounted directly on the oor so that no pier need be constructed. A photograph of this instrument is shown in Fig. 9.
D. Data analysis
Coarse alignment of the gravimeter along the vertical is done before the nal adjustments of the coil currents since the vertical position will change with gross changes of the tilt. Adjustment of the two tilt axes is iterated until it is clear that tilt in any direction will lower the sphere. Adjustment requires measurement of small changes of the position of the sphere so that it is complicated by the fact that turning the micrometers subjects the gravimeter to relatively large horizontal acceleration which will usually excite the orbital mode. The oscillations of the mode will then be superimposed on the tide signal. In order to determine shifts of the mean position accurately, it is necessary to observe several cycles of the mode so that the entire process can take up to a few hours depending on the damping of the mode. The nal step is to anneal the superconductors by raising the temperature above the normal operating temperature. The irreversible creep of ux into the superconductors seems to be eliminated by deliberately heating them above the operating temperature with the levitating eld turned on. The temperature is raised until the sphere drops irreversibly by a small fraction of the distance to the lower capacitor plate. After returning T to its normal operating value, the sphere is again centered by increasing the current in the lower coil.
C. Maintenance
There is no mechanical wear of the instrument since it has only one moving part and that part is magnetically levitated. There is no other degradation of the instrument over time since it operates at T 4.2 K where chemical processes are virtually eliminated. Therefore the only maintenance is that which is required to maintain the cryogenic temperatures. This means that at some intervals the liquid helium in the Dewar must be replenished. The time between such transfers of liquid helium is maximized through the use of the closed cycle refrigerators. The refrigerators require re-
The last step in using the instrument is, of course, analysis of the data. The initial steps in the analysis are common to almost any ultimate use of it and include removal of some artifacts as well as environmental inuences on gravity which may not be of interest. The principle artifacts are noise spikes and offsets or tares in the data that are a well known problem to users of all types of gravimeters. These are apparent sudden changes in gravity that usually result from subjecting the instrument to large accelerations but they have also resulted from lightning strikes and can occur without any apparent cause. They normally appear as changes between successive data points even when sampling at 10 s intervals and consequently are too rapid to result from any real change in gravity. They are removed from the data by tting straight lines to a short segment of good data on each side of the affected segment and subtracting the difference between the two intercepts from all data after the tare. If one or more data points on either side of the tare are also far from the smooth time dependencies, they are replaced by interpolating the straight line t to the data prior to the tare. If there is a longer segment of data that is damaged or missing, with or without a tare, a periodic signal containing the major tidal frequencies can be t to the good data and used for interpolation in place of a straight line. Tares that are smaller than about 1 gal may not be so easily removed from the raw data since they can be difcult to identify in the presence of the much larger tide signal. For such cases the tides must be removed rst, as discussed below. The size of the offset can then be determined by the method described above and removed from the raw data before detailed analysis is attempted. The noise on data sampled at 10 s intervals may be too large to reveal tares of this size so that in some cases they are more clearly revealed in data ltered to 1 or 2 min samples. Another artifact that has been signicant on some of the SG is an exponential approach of the sphere to its nal equilibrium position with a time constant as long as 300 days. Since it is very regular in time it can be t to the data along with tides, ocean load, and atmospheric gravity see Sec. IV and subsequently subtracted from the time series. More discussion of the inuence of offsets and exponential drift on the data is included in Sec. V. Beyond the removal of these artifacts from the data, the methods of analysis depend on the purposes of the investigator. Some of these methods are de-
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scribed in Sec. IV as part of a discussion of the uses of the instruments.

E. Calibration
For some purposes, such as testing models of the interior of the earth through measurements of the solid earth tides, it is essential to calibrate the gravimeter accurately. The SG can be calibrated to an accuracy of about 1% by applying a dc potential to the capacitor plates as described above but this is not sufcient for present day work. There are three methods that are currently used for the purpose. An accurately calculated gravity signal can be generated by moving a known mass near the gravimeter over known distances, assuming the validity of Newtons gravitation law, and assuming previously measured values of the gravitation constant are correct.2426 The gravimeter can be subjected to an accurately determined acceleration.27 Simultaneous measurements of the tides at the same location with an absolute gravimeter and the SG discussed below are compared. All of these methods are capable of an accuracy of 0.1% or better. The latter two were checked against each other and agreed within close to this limit.28
IV. PAST AND PRESENT APPLICATIONS
The capabilities of the SG have provided data which are not obtainable with other gravimeters. Some of the topics which have been investigated with this data are discussed below. Some of them will not be well resolved until local and global arrays of SG are used and the data are used in conjunction with that from other types of instrumentation. A global array of such data is the objective of the current GGP23 in which operators of SG at 17 sites distributed around the world have agreed to maintain and share standardized records between July 1, 1997 and July 1, 2003. No attempt has yet been made to use local arrays for engineering purposes or to study hydrology as discussed below. In this section some of the phenomena which cause changes in gravity that are measurable by the SG are described. Collectively they illustrate that continuous gravity records of this precision are required to distinguish the various causal relationships and thereby measure each of them with precision. Repeat survey measurements of short duration cannot serve this purpose no matter how accurate the instrument.
A. Tides of the solid earth and studies of the deep interior of the earth
FIG. 11. The gravity signal at Fairbanks, Alaska during September and October 1990 and its major components. a The raw gravity data is at the top, the computed theoretical solid earth tide is next, and the computed ocean load tide is at the bottom. The signals are articially offset for better display. b The solid line is the residual after subtracting the theoretical solid earth and ocean load tides from the raw signal. The dotted line is the barometric pressure. The strong correlation between the two is typical of all locations.
When the instruments were rst deployed, the clearest demonstration of their new capabilities was necessarily a measurement of the tides of the solid earth since the largest contribution to the time variation of g is the tides.13 Solid earth tides continue to be an important subject of study with the SG because they can provide unique information about the interior of the earth. Records of length one year or longer from SG measure the amplitudes of the various tidal periodicities to within about a nanogal ( 10 12 g). The major portion of the gravity tide signal is due to the force gradient from the sun and the moon. Due to the complexity of the
orbits of the moon and the earth, the spectrum of the forcing function is very rich. The terms fall into groups split successively by a cycle per day, a cycle per month 28 days , and a cycle per year plus some small terms at other frequencies. However, 16% of the tidal gravity signal results from the elastic yielding of the earth in response to these forces. This, geophysical, portion of the solid earth tide results from change in elevation distance to the center of the earth and from a shift in the distribution of mass.29 However, other phenomena inuence gravity at tidal frequencies so that precise measurement of the solid earth response requires measurement of these other phenomena as well. The principal contributions to the gravity signal are illustrated in Fig. 11 and described in the following paragraphs. The traditional approach to the study of earth tides has been the harmonic analysis in which sinusoids at the known tidal frequencies are t to the data to determine amplitudes and phases. The tidal potentials or forcing functions as a function of time can be determined with the very high accuracy of astronomical data for the orbits of the earth and moon.2933 Long time series of these potentials can then be developed and analyzed into spectral components with accurately determined amplitude and phase. By comparing the amplitudes and phases of the sinusoids t to the data with the computed tidal forcing functions at those frequencies, a fre-
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quency dependent amplitude and phase of the overall response of the earth is determined. Two software packages, 34 ETERNA, and BAYTAP-G35 designed for various types of tidal analysis and removal of tides are now widely used in this eld. The problem then becomes one of identifying the various contributions to this response. The direct effect of the forcing function combined with the elastic response of the solid earth is the largest term and has been calculated using specic geophysical models of the earth.3638 The next largest contribution is from the loading of the ocean tides discussed below. In the harmonic method of analysis one must subtract a calculated ocean load effect for each tidal frequency from observed data in order to compare data to geophysical predictions of solid earth tides. Therefore, in order to search for deviations from predictions concerning the solid earth one must assume that computed ocean loads are accurate. An alternative approach ts the full time dependencies predicted for the ocean load tide and for the solid earth tide to the data.24 This yields the amplitude of both predicted effects and the residual signal is then analyzed for frequency and time dependent departures from the geophysical predictions.
1. Inuence of ocean tides
The tidal motion of the oceans contributes as much as 10% of the total measured diurnal and semidiumal gravity tides at mid latitudes. At the poles it is 100% since there are no diurnal or semidiurnal tides there. The ocean tides are approximately 90 out of phase with the tidal driving force but both amplitude and phase vary substantially with location. Measurement of the solid earth portion of the tides therefore requires that the inuence of the ocean loading effect be calculable to the same absolute accuracy as the desired precision of the measurement. Calculation of the effect requires detailed knowledge of the ocean tides everywhere and a method for calculating the response of the solid earth to the shifting mass of the ocean tides. The accuracy of our knowledge of the ocean tides has improved dramatically in the past two decades as a consequence of satellite data.39 Using a global model for the height of the ocean tides based on these data,40 the inuence on gravity is computed by integrating a Greens function for the response of the earth to a point load at its surface.41 A suite of computer programs to allow computation of the ocean load effect anywhere on the globe on this basis has been made available by Agnew.40 One test of the accuracy of these computed ocean load tides indicated that they agree with measurements to within 0.1 gal at the south pole42,43 where all of the measured diurnal and semidiumal gravity tide is due to the ocean load effect. However, by using the nonharmonic method of tidal analysis mentioned above at mid latitudes, where both gravity tides and load tides are large, a signicant difference between calculated and measured values was found.24 Nonetheless, the computed values are now sufciently accurate so that when they are subtracted from measured tide signals, the result can be analyzed for a number of other phenomena discussed below. The global array of instruments involved in
the GGP will provide the best opportunity yet to test the ocean models and optimally remove the ocean load from the solid earth tides. If nontidal signals are of interest, the objective is to remove all periodic terms at tidal frequencies, rather than to measure them. This is done by tting and subtracting sinusoids at tidal frequencies to the full gravity signal. The optimal number of frequencies to t to the data depends on the length of record to be analyzed. More than one hundred terms can be used for records of one year or longer. For records of less than one month the optimal removal is obtained by tting somewhere between 8 and 12 frequencies. An alternative is to subtract the full time series of the theoretical computed solid earth gravity tide and ocean load effect from the signal and then t and subtract sinusoids from the remaining residual signal. The latter method requires tting many fewer terms to achieve equivalent results. Using either method, some small periodic terms always remain in the data. The cause of these remaining periodic terms is probably due to amplitude modulation of the tides by atmospheric inuence on the ocean tides but denitive identication will be important for further study of the tides and related geophysical problems. In spite of the major advances in the computation of the response of the earth and the inuence of ocean tides, the predictions of the total time dependence differ from measurements by as much as a few gal. Consequently, measurement of nontidal changes in gravity to within a few gal at any given location may require measurement rather than computation of the tides at that location. For most purposes, at noncoastal sites, the tides are determined to sufcient accuracy with one or two months of measurement. The amplitudes and phases determined are then sufciently stable so that they can be used to correct future short duration survey measurements at the same site to within 1 gal. However, in coastal regions the inuence of storm surges and seasonal variations in sea level might not be predetermined with comparable precision. In that case concurrent measurement of sea level along the coast near the gravimeter station would be needed since very local inuences of harbors and changes in bottom topography would render future predictions unreliable at the 1 gal level.
2. Gravity variations due to the atmosphere
After the gravity tides and the ocean load effect, the next largest inuence on gravity is due to the atmosphere.4449 This is of interest for its possible contribution to atmospheric physics but also must be removed from the gravity signal before properties of the solid earth can be deduced. Its effect on tidal amplitudes and phases is small but measurable except at periods close to 1 and 2 cycles per solar day where the effect can be large. The irregular distribution of the mass of the atmosphere due to weather systems produces changes in gravity in the same manner as the oceans by gravitational attraction of the shifting atmospheric mass and by distortion of the surface of the earth. The largest portion of the effect from the atmosphere is the local direct gravitational attraction of its mass above the gravimeter. As pressure increases, the density increases so that the total mass above the
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3. The interior of the earth
FIG. 12. Power spectra of gravity and atmospheric data at Cantley, Canada for a two year record indicating that the dominant source of gravity noise over the frequency range shown is from the atmosphere. Data from Ref. 50 provided by David Crossley.
gravimeter increases and consequently gravity decreases. A small contribution of the opposite sign results from the local depression of the surface of the earth with increasing pressure. Periodic variation of atmospheric pressure due to diurnal heating and cooling also produces a measurable gravity variation. Most if this is a local effect but part is due to the global atmospheric tides49 due to solar radiation rather than tidal forces . Both effects vary with the seasons and location. The gravity/atmospheric pressure admittance for the local effects varies in time according to the size and shape of weather system but is normally close to 0.3 gal/mbar. The correlation between gravity, after earth and ocean tides have been removed, and barometric pressure, measured at the site of the gravimeter, is normally very high as indicated in Fig. 11. Thus it can normally be removed from the gravity records to within about 1 gal by tting and subtracting a single pressure record. Since the admittance changes in time the atmospheric effect can be better t in shorter segments of data. It can also be better t if low passed and high passed barometer records, with a crossover at about ve days, are t separately to the gravity data. Using pressure records from an array of locations, accounting for the response of the ocean to atmospheric pressure and for the stratication of the atmosphere further improves the agreement with measured gravity changes.46,47 Further demonstration of the dominance of atmospheric noise is provided by comparing the power spectra of gravity and barometric pressure. Figure 12 shows the spectra for a two year period at Cantley, Quebec.50 Very recently, analysis of 11 years of data from the International Deployment of Accelerometers IDA network of LacosteRomberg gravimeters discussed below has shown that seismic noise in the 27 mHz frequency range is due to atmospheric turbulence.51,52
Most of the present knowledge about the interior of the earth has been obtained through analysis of seismic data and from the ringing of the normal modes of the earth after earthquakes. However, data from the SG can provide information that is not available by any other means. These include some properties of the liquid core and the low frequency viscoelastic properties of the mantle and crust. One of the long standing unsolved geophysical problems is the frequency dependence of the dissipation in the solid earth. The dissipation has been determined at seismic frequencies and for the normal modes of the earth roughly 1 to 100 cycles per hour . It can also be determined at the very long periods corresponding to glacial rebound. However, for the wide range in between there are no simple means for measuring it. In principle the dissipation at tide frequencies could be measured by the phase shift relative to theoretical gravity tides but this would require more accurate computed ocean loads than are currently available. Another approach is through the measurement of the Q of the nearly diurnal free wobble and other internal modes of the earth.5356 The nearly diurnal free wobble is observed by gravity through the resonant response of the earth to tidal forcing at frequencies close to the wobble frequency. A closely related phenomenon is the Chandler Wobble57 with a period of 435 days.5862 This is a wobble of the axis of rotation of the earth relative to its body axis. One of the problems here has been to determine what excites the wobble since its Q is nite but the oscillations never damp out completely. It alters latitude and therefore the centrifugal force due to the rotation of the earth. Both of these phenomena are due to oscillations of the interior of the earth due to the ellipticity of the boundary between the liquid core and the mantle of the earth. Prior to the SG the Chandler Wobble had been measured only by astronomical observations using zenith tubes. Currently the rotation effects can be measured most accurately using satellite data and by very long base radio interferometry.63 However, even at this low frequency, there is evidence that the ocean responds differently than the solid earth. Gravity measures a combination of the shifts in rotation, the response of the ocean mass to them, and the distortion of the crust due to the ocean response. A combination of satellite data and gravity data of sufcient accuracy could allow identication of these different effects. Removal of the gravity effect of the polar motion is essential for measurement of secular changes in gravity since it can amount to several gal, depending on latitude. The solid inner core can also oscillate with respect to the body center of the earth. Due to the rotation of the earth this should lead to a triplet of frequencies.64 Detecting and measuring these oscillations would provide additional constraints on the properties of the liquid core. Long records from the SG offer the only present hope of conrming this prediction. One analysis65,66 found evidence for the triplet in records from SG but the conclusion is contested.67 Additional information is being obtained.68 Much more data from a wider geographical distribution of SG are anticipated from the GGP so that if the triplet will ever be observable above geophysical noise it should appear in that data.
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The normal modes of the earth are excited by earthquakes69 and, due to their high Q, some will ring at measurable amplitudes for several days after large, deep events. Their frequencies and the splitting of the modes due to rotation and ellipticity can be calculated from specic models of the interior of the earth7072 so that measurements of the frequencies can be used to constrain these models.73 A global effort to measure the frequencies, splittings, and damping of all of the modes has been underway since 1975 by the IDA network.74 This effort has used large numbers of LacosteRomberg, spring type gravimeters placed around the earth. A recent study has found that, at periods shorter than about 1 h, the best spring type gravimeters can be less noisy than the compared SG.75 Nonetheless, the modes are clearly measured by the SG so that the global array of the GGP will contribute to the eld. Discussion of the causes for the higher noise level at high frequencies in the SG and possible remedies is provided in Sec. V.
4. Tectonophysics: Vertical crustal motion along plate boundaries
According to Newtons gravitation law, local gravity depends on the distance to the center of the earth. Thus g changes as the surface moves up and down in response to loading from the ocean or atmospheres, as discussed above, or due to tectonic processes and the buildup of seismic strain. The dependence of g on elevation above an idealized spherically symmetric earth is 3 gal/cm. The SG has been shown to be able to distinguish real gravity changes of about 1 gal from those due to ocean, atmosphere, and ground water see discussion in Sec. V . This means that changes in elevation as small as 3 mm can be measured. Displacements of the order of 1 cm/year or greater are known to occur at plate boundaries and in regions of glacial rebound. However, such secular gravity changes can result from shifting of mass beneath the surface as well as from vertical displacement. GPS measurements of surface displacement can be made to about 1 cm accuracy so that the combination of gravity and geodetic measurements can now determine both vertical displacement and displacement of mass beneath the surface.76 Displacement of mass can result from changes in meteoric groundwater discussed below or from compression or expansion due to stress. Measurement of these small, slow changes require reliable determination of any possible instrumental drift. This is also discussed in Sec. V.
5. Hydrology: Effects of rainfall
FIG. 13. Rainfall and gravity as a function of time through two rainy seasons at The Geysers geothermal eld in northern California. The ratio of gravity change to rainfall is slightly larger than 0.4 gal/cm indicating that the gravimeter was on top of a small basin into which water drained rapidly from a wider area during the rainstorms. The gravity signal does not decrease immediately after the rainstorms until late in the season during the rst year. During the second year the measurements were terminated before gravity began to decrease. Apparently when total rainfall reached 100 cm in the rst year, the pressure in a local aquifer became sufciently great to force a rapid drainage. The total rainfall during the second year was only 60 cm.
An innite sheet of water 1 cm thick produces a gravitational eld of 0.4 gal. Thus 1 cm of rainfall will increase gravity by 0.4 gal at locations where it falls more rapidly than it can drain away laterally. Clear correlations with rainfall at this ratio are observed at locations where lateral drainage is slow7780 Fig. 13 . The ratio of gravity change to rainfall during the rain in such locations, if it is greater than 0.4 gal/cm, measures the area from which rain is collected into an aquifer beneath the gravimeter. The rate at which gravity decreases after rainfall has ceased, measures the net ow rate out of the aquifer. At The Geysers, California and
at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory,78 the time dependence of the gravity signal from rainfall was accurately modeled using simple models with discrete aquifers and xed ow rates between them. Gravity variations with rainfall such as these measure the integrated effect of the total mass of water in the ground around the gravimeter. Water table measurements using drilled wells measure only at the point of the well and therefore provide incomplete information in inhomogeneous terrain. An array of gravimeters could map the areal extent of a large aquifer, identify its sources and sinks, and measure the total change of mass from season to season. The information obtained in this manner would greatly exceed what can be obtained by episodic gravity surveys, as a consequence of the continuous records and the higher resolution of the SG. Only with continuous records can all environmental inuences on gravity be identied so that measurements of a specic inuence such as groundwater can be made with better than 1 gal precision. For purposes other than hydrology, the inuence of groundwater is a signal that must be removed from the data.
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At most locations, measurements of rainfall, water table, and soil moisture above the water table are required. At Richmond, Florida the terrain was at, uniform, and highly porous and the combination of these three measurements allowed the removal of the gravity effect with high condence.78 In Fairbanks, Alaska a well was used to monitor the water table hourly, two capacitive soil moisture gauges recorded every 2 min were buried at depths of 1 and 2 m, and precipitation was recorded daily. Apparently due to the permafrost, topography, and the relatively small amount of precipitation, no inuence of ground water on gravity was detected there.
B. Fundamental gravity
The earliest use of the SG for an experiment in fundamental gravity was a test for the existence of a universal preferred reference frame and an anisotropy of the gravitational constant.8183 A detailed investigation of the frequency dependence of tidal amplitudes and phases was used to set an upper limit on a parameter that represents the inuence of a preferred reference frame on the laws of physics. These tests could be improved with the use of longer records from multiple instruments and by examining additional tidal constituents. More recently, experiments have looked for departures from the gravitational inverse square law.25,26 Another potential use of the gravimeters is the detection of gravity waves using the earth as an antenna. Selective excitation of normal modes of the earth that can respond to the quadrupole nature of gravity waves, at times when no seismic events are detected would provide the evidence.84,85 An early claim to have observed gravity waves in this manner was performed with an unsuccessful redesign of the superconducting gravimeter which had a higher noise level than the Lacoste meters of the IDA network.73,74,84 The results have not been conrmed with better instruments. The method has serious difculties which have not yet been surmounted. One is the difculty of distinguishing excitations caused by silent earthquakes from those caused by gravity waves. These are earthquakes which occur sufciently slowly so that they do not create teleseismic waves but nonetheless excite low frequency normal modes.86 A second difculty is that the anticipated energy density of gravity waves at these low frequencies is very low.
V. PERFORMANCE OF THE SG AND COMPARISON TO OTHER GRAVIMETERS
bulk of gravity work in the past. Most gravimeters were designed for survey work.87 Complete understanding of time dependent variations measured by the SG will also require measurements of their location dependence on both a global and local scale. Since all three instruments are too costly to anticipate deployment by the thousands, surveys relative to the locations of the SG will provide a useful alternative to such arrays for many purposes. The high resolution time dependent measurements of the SG will allow accurate determination of the inuence of ocean tides, atmosphere, and groundwater at a given site. If the data reveal a gravity change in addition to these effects, a survey around the site would use the accurately measured ocean, atmosphere, and in some cases groundwater effects, to correct the survey measurements and determine over how large a region the additional effect appeared. The two other types of meters are used primarily as survey meters and each has its special advantages.
A. LaCosteRomberg and other spring types
The LaCosteRomberg gravimeter is the most widely used of the spring type gravimeters described briey in Refs. 29 and 87 and therefore the most widely used of any gravimeter. It is used for airborn, shipboard, and borehole surveys as well as the more common ground based surveys. Its virtues are that it is small, light weight, and can be setup for measurements in a few minutes. Some of these instruments have been modied to include a capacitive detection system analogous to that of the SG along with feedback for use as a tidal gravimeter. As a ground based survey instrument it can provide accuracy and resolution of a few gal over short distances and short time periods. For high precision work two or more of them are used simultaneously88 and the survey is done in a closed loop to check for closure upon return to the starting point. Their defects relative to the SG are that they drift randomly, the calibration varies in time and with position of the nulling screw, and when operated out of feedback they are nonlinear.89 They are also susceptible to tares from shock and are temperature sensitive. These all limit the accuracy of measurements made over long time intervals, large distances, or at different elevations. However, for rapid local surveys over short distances they are an excellent complement to the SG.
B. The absolute gravimeter
The SG is unique for the low noise level it provides over a broad range of frequencies but two other types of gravimeters are in widespread use for the unique features they provide. At present, no instrument exists which combines all of the advantages of all three. A brief comparison of these features is provided here along with a discussion of how they should be used in complementary fashion for a rigorous gravity research program. The SG has been used primarily to obtain high resolution measurements of gravity as a function of time at a xed location. However, relative changes as a function of location gravity surveys also provide very important geophysical information and have constituted the
The absolute gravimeter90 AG measures the acceleration of an object falling in vacuum. It uses laser interferometry to measure the position of a falling mirror. The accuracy and precision of the instrument has improved over time with improvements in laser stability and the development of active vibration isolation.91 It has been used primarily for repeat gravity measurements over widely separated locations but can also be used to make continuous measurements. Its major virtue is that its measurements are absolute, to within an accuracy which in some cases approaches 1 gal9294 see Fig. 14 . However, some measurements strayed from continuous records with the SG by as much as 8 gal.94 A
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FIG. 14. Data from Membach, Belgium compared with measurements by AG model FG5 . A tidal model, atmospheric gravity, polar motion, and a linear drift of 4.8 gal per year have been subtracted from the SG data. The AG data from May to December 1997 have been corrected for an offset of 4 gal due to a problem in the timing electronics which was corrected. There was a gap of one month in the SG data during 1996 so that long term comparison of the instruments is valid only within the two continuous data segments. Data provided by Olivier Francis of the European Center for Geodynamics and Seismology.
measurement of g at a particular location on the earth can be compared with later measurements at that location no matter how far into the future. When used as a survey meter, its accuracy is not degraded by the time, distance, or elevation change between measurements. In order to realize these advantages over the LaCoste Romberg survey meter, more time is required to setup the instrument and to make measurements. Its disadvantages for long term continuous measurements relative to the SG are that it does not provide sub- gal noise level and that it has many moving parts so that it would not operate for many years without interruption. Typically the mirror is dropped about every 10 s so that the data is sampled at this interval but without the possibility of antialiasing preltering of the data. As in the case of the LaCosteRomberg meter it can be used as an excellent complement to the SG. Repeat measurements at the site of a SG can provide a cross check on measured secular changes to determine whether they are real or instrumental and can eliminate ambiguities from offsets induced by earthquakes or other large mechanical disturbances see Fig. 14 . It has also been used to calibrate the SG28,95,96 by simultaneous measurements with both instruments at the same location for about 2 weeks. The full time dependence of gravity Fig. 11 a measured by the SG is then t to the variation measured by the AG and the single parameter of the t is the calibration constant.
C. The superconducting gravimeter
The virtues of the SG relative to the other two types are: Its noise level is lower over a very wide range of frequencies. Long term drift when it occurs is a well determined function of time so that it can in most cases be unambiguously removed from the data. The calibration constant is xed by the geometry of the coils and suspended mass so that it remains
the same if the instrument is turned off and on again no matter how long the time between. It is simple mechanically with only one moving part, which is magnetically levitated so that very long term, uninterrupted operation is possible. The most important property of the SG is its low frequency performance so that it would be useful to be able to specify its noise power as a function of frequency and compare it to natural or cultural noise. The impediments to doing so are that this noise cannot be measured by any other instrument in this frequency range and that some SG have drift and tares that were mentioned above. Although these effects cause uncertainties of at most a few parts in 109 they are entirely absent in some of the records so that it is clear that essentially drift and tare free SG have been and can be produced. It has been difcult to nd instrument modications to completely eliminate them from all SG because of the large amount of resources and time required to explore all of the possible parameters. Progress has been made by testing for the most likely causes8 which include; the cool down and magnetic eld history of the initialization procedure, the stability of the magnetic eld produced by the supercurrents, the temperature control, the capacitance bridge, tilt control, gas adsorption and desorption from the levitated sphere, and the method of manufacturing the sphere. Regardless of what the causes may be there is a large amount of eld data from more than 20 instruments operated during the past 20 years which denes the limits of performance. It demonstrates that with both drift free and drift corrected records, atmospheric and ground water gravity signals can be identied and subtracted from the data. When tares and drift are also removed the residual peak variations are about 2 gal over periods of years.97,58,59,50 In some cases, long term drift cannot be unambiguosly identied as either true gravity changes or instrumental drift. The use of multiple instruments, the new dual sphere instrument from GWR, or the combined use with the AG is currently allowing resolution of the ambiguity.94 Some examples of eld data illustrate these statements. For 10 commercial instruments that have reported long term behavior, three set upper limits on the instrumental drift of 2 gal year,98100 two showed exponential drifts which decreased to less than 1 gal/year after less than 1 year,101,102 two measured drifts of about 5 gal/year for which real changes in gravity were not eliminated,103,104 one showed a linear drift of 3 gal/year which also was not conrmed as instrument drift,105 two gravimeters at Boulder Colorado showed the same drift of 8 gal/year59 but disagreed with the absolute measurements over that time.94 A two year record at Boulder Colorado94,106 revealed 4 tares triggered by power outages and a helium transfer. Analysis of one year of data from an instrument of the current generation of GWR gravimeters (C021) at Membach, Belgium, revealed106 13 tares, all but one triggered by electrical disturbances. This small number of offsets is accurately removed from the data so that the long term variation of gravity at the site could be measured by both the SG and an AG. The two measurements agreed within 1 gal while both showed an apparently real increase in gravity of about 8 gal during the period of measurement. The full 3 1/2 years
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FIG. 15. The difference between gravity signals from two SG at Richmond, Florida solid line and rainfall dotted line for the month of September 1990. The largest discrepancy occurred at the time of a heavy rainfall. This implies that the rain moved the pier under one of the gravimeters differently than the other.
of data from this instrument along with AG measurements is shown in Fig. 14. Maximum deviation of the AG from the SG record is about 1 gal except for one point and is consistent with the error bars on the AG data. A 30 day simultaneous record of the Membach SG and another GWR instrument before shipment showed maximum deviations of 0.3 gal over 30 days under relatively unstable operating conditions.8 This level of stability was reached within short periods after cool down and setup ranging from one day to two weeks. Three of the original seven UCSD instruments were updated in the early 90s. One showed no measurable drift for two years of operation.25 A second measured large changes that appeared to result from ground water effects.78 The third was operated at San Diego, California, Richmond, Florida, and Fairbanks, Alaska. At Richmond, the operation was interrupted twice by refrigeration failures. Upon restarting the instrument an exponential approach to equilibrium was found each time but with different time constants.97 This record was the rst to be compared to an AG and the total change in gravity after correcting for the exponentials and offsets agreed with the AG within the 3 gal error of the absolute measurements at that time. Upon termination of the work at Richmond, SGB was moved to Fairbanks without warming above 4 K. No drift was measurable for the rst 100 days until the data was interrupted and the instrument needed to be restarted. After the interruption there was again an exponential drift. A better indication of the instrument capabilities is obtained when two or more instruments are run simultaneously at the same place.94,96,97 In that case any differences between the records are necessarily due to the instrument or its mounting. The noise on the difference is indeed much smaller than on either instrument alone, proving that the noise on the individual SG records is dominated by real gravity changes. With two or more instruments, instrumental tares not simultaneous on both instruments as small as 0.1 0.2 gal are clearly identied in individual instrument records and can be removed from both records. A detailed example of the difference signal between two instruments is shown in Fig. 15. The data is for the month of September
1990 with a UCSD instrument, SGB, and GWR instrument, T001, in Richmond, Florida. The two instruments were in the same building on separate piers located about 5 m from each other. The data have been ltered and decimated to samples at 1 h intervals. T001 displayed a large exponential drift97 It was later rebuilt. and the SGB record was on the tail of an exponential, drifting at about 2 gal/month at this time. The curve in Fig. 15 was obtained by rst tting the T001 raw data to the SGB data to nd the ratio of their calibration factors from the tide signal, and then subtracting the T001 signal times the ratio from SGB. The resulting difference data then consisted of the relative drift of the two instruments, one tare of about 5 gal and four tares less than 0.2 gal plus the noise of undetermined origin. The tares were removed by tting straight lines to small segments of data on either side of the tare and subtracting the difference between their intercepts from all data after the tare. A single exponential was then t to the patched difference data and subtracted from it. The result shows that peak differences between the two instruments are mostly less than 0.2 gal except for one excursion to about 0.4 gal which occurs at the time of a heavy rainfall also shown in Fig. 15 . It is not correlated with atmospheric pressure or temperature or with temperature in the building. This implies that the pier of one of the instruments moved relative to the other as a result of the rainfall. Indeed, during rainstorms a puddle formed at the corner of the building closest to SGB. The soil at Richmond was found to be highly porous.78,79 The standard deviation from the average for the month is 0.09 gal and the statistical uncertainty in the average for the 30 days is 0.003 gal. These data demonstrate the ultimate limits of performance of the SG but also provide warning that at the level of 0.5 gal, very local effects can change gravity. This emphasizes the point that continuous records of gravity and environmental variables are necessary for identifying the source of such changes. The noise on most individual residuals after performing the best possible subtraction of atmospheric and ground water gravity is 2 gal, an order of magnitude larger than the differences between colocated instruments. Some of this 2 gal residual is almost certainly due to inadequate removal of atmospheric and ocean gravity signals. Better prediction of the atmospheric effects will result from and contribute to better understanding of the atmosphere. However, other geophysical noise sources are also likely to be involved. In the new dual sphere instrument produced by GWR Fig. 2 the two gravity sensors are rigidly connected in the cryogenic environment so that there can be no inuence of the support structure of the instrument. This instrument provided data that identied a temperature dependence of the GWR electronics and transformer for the capacitance bridge. The UCSD instruments place the transformer in the cryostat and the electronics are placed in an r shielded, temperature regulated enclosure. One tare on the difference signal was observed during testing and the data showed that tares of one sensor relative to the other as small as 0.05 gal can be identied and removed.3 The primary disadvantage of the SG is that, in its present form, it cannot be subjected to large accelerations without
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inducing tares in the record or exciting the orbital mode. For this reason it is not currently useful as a survey instrument. Another disadvantage is that it is a relative instrument so that if it is turned off and on again, there is no way to determine whether gravity has changed while it was off. This disadvantage could be eliminated by using more than one instrument at a given location so that one or the other is always running, or by bridging gaps between SG records with absolute measurements. The use of both AG and the SG together will improve the measurements made by both. The long, high resolution records of the SG will provide an accurate determination of the gravity admittance of ocean, atmosphere, and ground water at a given site. The ocean effect will be largely independent of time so that a determination of total gravity tide variations at a given site should be valid indenitely. The admittance of the atmosphere, as measured by a single pressure station, varies by as much as 30% over time and the data in Fig. 11 show that this can lead to errors of 2 gal or greater. However, if a network of pressure measurements is available a correction to greater precision is possible.107 Corrections for ground water can be 10s of gal Fig. 13 . Since the water is in the soil and in various aquifers beneath the surface it would not be possible to correct absolute measurements for it without continuous records that determine the time dependence of gravity after rainfall or the relation between water table level, soil moisture, and gravity. Thus if the absolute measurements are to be useful at the 1 gal level that they are capable of, continuous records of gravity and environmental variables must rst be made at the sites in order to develop the algorithms for relating environmental variables to gravity. Conversely, if SG records are to be useful for decades or centuries, the AG will be necessary to tie records together that may be separated by many years.
VI. POTENTIAL FUTURE USES
There is a wide range of geophysical and fundamental gravity topics which might be approached with high resolution, continuous gravity records such as those provided by the SG. Work on some of them has begun but will not be completed until more data is obtained from more instruments. Major new opportunities will result from improvements of the instrument to allow surveys to be made to the same sub- gal accuracy as are time dependencies at a xed location.
A. Potential advances in instrumentation
mercial instruments has satised the requirement. It remains to be determined what particular properties of that instrument were responsible. Alternatively, a removable clamp for the sphere could be developed which would immobilize the sphere when the instrument was to be moved. Simplication of setup of the instrument would be desirable both for possible survey work and for measurements of a few months duration at a large number of sites to determine tidal parameters. This can be accomplished by automating the tilt adjust procedure through computer control and by connecting the two support coils in series with correct turns ratio so that no adjustment of the force gradient is required. An important advance for long term operation at remote sites will arise from the development of closed cycle refrigerators which operate at 4.2 K and use less than the current 24 kW of power. Long term drift and tares degrade the performance of the instruments even though, in most circumstances they can be clearly identied and removed from the data. The source of these problems and the means to solve them clearly exists since instruments have been made which show no measurable drift and very small numbers of tares. However, even without solving the problem, the use of two instruments at a site or of the dual sensor instrument will identify nearly all instrumental tares. Some of the recently discovered high T C superconductors have critical temperatures above 77 K liquid nitrogen . In principle, the complexity of the refrigeration requirements for the device, and therefore the cost, complexity, and power requirements for eld operation, could be reduced by operating at this temperature. In practice thermal excitation of ux jumps will be greater at the higher temperature so that the noise level and long term stability of such a gravimeter cannot be predicted. Flux pinning might be sufciently strong in some of the materials to overcome this problem. However, the advantages over operation at liquid helium temperature and the likelihood of success are, thus far, too small to motivate the required development effort.
B. Potential new research
A major advance toward sub- gal survey capability would result from elimination of the orbital mode. Doing so would allow rapid recovery from the mechanical disturbance of moving the instrument and rapid adjustment of the tilt and the sphere position. This can be accomplished either by applying mechanical constraints to hold the sphere on the instrument axis or by winding additional coils to apply magnetic elds in the horizontal plane. In order to eliminate all barriers to use as a survey meter, the instrument would also need to be free of tares that result from mechanical shocks. There is no doubt that this is possible since one of the com-
It is not possible to anticipate new discoveries that might result from measurements at a new level of precision such as that of the SG. However, a few which are suggested by previous work are suggested here without describing detailed proposals. One of the original objectives in developing the gravimeter was to be able to measure vertical motion of the crust. Elevation changes of order 1 cm can now be measured by GPS data. If there were no associated displacement of mass beneath the surface this would result in a change of 3 gal which is now measurable over any period of time if all of the techniques described above are used to remove other effects. Departures from this ratio-of-elevation change to gravity change will determine whether mass was also added or removed beneath the surface and how much. One example is the measurement of sea level changes over periods of years. A direct measurement of water depth does not necessarily measure a change in sea level since it could also be
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due to a vertical displacement of the land. A gravimeter on a platform attached to bedrock beneath the water will measure a gravity change due to sea level change plus that due to vertical displacement of the land. The depth of water can be measured directly so that its contribution to the change in gravity can be calculated accurately from its measured density. If this computed change agrees with the measurement, the change of water depth is a real change in sea level and not due to vertical crustal motion. Although GPS measurements can, in principle measure the vertical crustal motion directly, it does not yet provide the precision that can be achieved with the SG. Another approach to sea level change will use the global array of SG in the GGP to detect a world wide change in gravity due to sea level change.108 Earthquakes occur when sufcient strain accumulates in the crust to cause blocks on either side of a fault to slip. Some of the strain will always lead to compression and therefore to shifts of local gravity. This could arise from uplift or subsidence near the fault line or from changes in porosity and pore pressure in the rock. Hints of measurable effects associated with earthquakes have been observed in the records obtained with UCSD gravimeters at two sites with very different types of seismicity77,109 Fig. 16 . These were in contradiction with the gravity changes that might be expected from straightforward models of earthquakes.110 Conrmation of them at additional sites would provide a powerful new tool for studying earthquake mechanisms. The inuence of groundwater on gravity has, thus far, been mainly a nuisance that obscures the measurement of other phenomena. However, the potential for application to specic hydrological problems remains to be exploited. For example, continuous gravity measurements coupled with gravity survey measurements could measure the total mass change in a deep aquifer drawn down for cultural use, the rate at which it is replenished, and the rate of its response to climate changes. The ratio of local barometric pressure change to the correlated gravity change varies by as much as 50% at a given location. The time dependence of this ratio has not been adequately explored. The ratio measures primarily the size of the weather system associated with the pressure change. However, it also depends on the vertical distribution of the mass displacement. Since gravity measures a three dimensional 3D integral of the mass distribution it provides a different measurement than other tools of atmospheric physics. In fundamental physics, the gravitational eld is the least understood of any of the fundamental forces. Questions which may be approachable using high resolution gravity measurements in the laboratory include measurements of the gravitational constant, G, such as further tests for a distance dependence, a time dependence, a spatial anisotropy, and improved measurement of its absolute value. Others might be, improved tests for a universal preferred reference frame, direct detection of gravity waves, and improved tests of the equivalence principle.
FIG. 16. Gravity changes at Fairbanks Alaska corresponding to earthquakes within 500 km. a The dashed line is at the time of an earthquake of magnitude 4.6, at a depth of 10 km, and distance 63 km. Gravity decreased sharply before the earthquake and the quake occurred at about the time gravity reached a maximum. b A month during which there was a large amount of seismic activity and large uctuations in gravity. The solid squares represent the cumulative sum of the magnitudes of all earthquakes in central Alaska during the month. The two largest events in the region were on May 16, magnitude 4.0, depth 106 km, distance 126 km, and on May 17, magnitude 4.7, depth 130 km, distance 450 km. In this case gravity also decreased prior to the events and they occurred when gravity reached a peak value.
VII. DISCUSSION
The long term stability of the SG has provided previously unobtainable data about time variations of gravity at the surface of the earth. These data have provided new information about phenomena as diverse as the global ocean tides and variations of ground water. In order to reach the new levels of precision continuous records are compared to simultaneous records of environmental variables and models of the earth tides. Much of what has been learned is limited by narrow geographical distribution of the instruments and by natural and man made accelerations of the surface of the earth rather than by instrument capabilities. In the past few years a sufcient array of the instruments around the globe has been created to allow improvements of previous measurements and to search for new phenomena. Some improvements of the instrument are still possible to remove the small inuence of tares and drift and to make it portable, but these defects have not limited the information obtained thus far. Thorough exploitation of gravity measurements will require deployment of gravimeters in numbers similar to current deployment of seismometers. Ideally they would have the long term stability of the SG, the absolute capability of the AG, and be portable like the LacosteRomberg. In order to de-
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ploy them in large numbers they must also cost about the same as seismometers. Given sufcient demand the SG could be developed into such an instrument. It is very likely that some technology, possibly the SG, will achieve these goals in the future so that the new possibilities demonstrated by the current SG will be realized. In the meantime, the present instruments are creating an archive of precise data that will serve as reference points for phenomena that will evolve over decades or centuries in a manner analogous to ancient astronomical observations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Richard Warburton for reading and commenting on the text, for pointing out additional references and for providing photographs and drawings from GWR Instruments. I also wish to thank Olivier Francis of the European Center for Geodynamics and Seismology for providing the data from Membach.
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REVIEW OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS

VOLUME 70, NUMBER 11

REVIEW ARTICLE The superconducting gravimeter

Electronic mail: jgoodkind@ucsd.edu 4131

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

FIG. 1. Diagram of the cryogenic portion of the superconducting gravimeter.

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

scribed in Sec. IV as part of a discussion of the uses of the instruments.

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

1. Inuence of ocean tides

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

3. The interior of the earth

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

B. The absolute gravimeter

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 70, No. 11, November 1999

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