Determination of the thermal noise limit in test of weak equivalence principle with a rotating torsion pendulum

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

Influence of the environmental noise on determining the period of a torsion pendulum

The environmental noise can restrict the accuracy of period estimation since the torsion pendulum is sensitive to weak forces. Two typical models for the environmental noise are proposed to make an evaluation. Generally, the stationary environmental noise is modeled as a white noise, and contributes to the period uncertainty as a function of the initial amplitude, the quality factor, the variance of noise and the time length. As to a sudden sharp disturbance acting on the pendulum, a narrow impulse model is constructed. It results in a sharp jump in the phase difference, which can be excluded with the 3σ criterion for a correction. An experimental data analysis for the measurement of the gravitational constant G with the time-of-swing method shows that the period uncertainty due to the environmental noise is about one and a half times the fundamental thermal noise limit. Though this result is dependent on the ambient environment, the analysis is instructive to improve the measurement accuracy of experiments.

Correlation method estimation of the modulation signal in the weak equivalence principle test

In a test of the weak equivalence principle （WEP） with a rotating torsion pendulum, it is important to estimate the amplitude of the modulation signal with high precision. We use a torsional filter to remove the free oscillation signal and employ the correlation method to estimate the amplitude of the modulation signal. The data analysis of an experiment shows that the uncertainties of amplitude components of the modulation signal obtained by the correlation method are in agreement with those due to white noise. The power spectral density of the modulation signal obtained by the correlation method is about one order higher than the thermal noise limit. It indicates that the correlation method is an effective way to estimate the amplitude of the modulation signal and it is instructive to conduct a high-accuracy WEP test.