A Determination of the Local Gravitational Acceleration for the Tsinghua Tabletop Kibble Balance

Abstract: The Kibble balance requires a measurement of the local gravitational acceleration, $g$, with a typical relative measurement uncertainty of $10^{-9}$. In this paper, the determination of $g$ for the Tsinghua tabletop Kibble balance is presented. A polynomial fitting method is proposed for blind transfers of the absolute gravitational acceleration using relative gravimeters, showing agreement with the value obtained by the tide correction within a few parts in $10^{9}$. Horizontal and vertical gravity gradients are extracted by mapping the gravity distribution at different heights. The self-attraction effect of major components in the experiment, as well as some time-varying systematic effects, are modeled. The final determination of the gravitational acceleration at the mass position, with an uncertainty of 5.4 $\mu$Gal ($k=2$), is achieved for the Tsinghua tabletop Kibble balance experiment.