The superconducting gravimeter

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 field 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 sufficient 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.