Overcoming 1 part in $10^9$ of Earth angular rotation rate measurement with the G Wettzell data

Abstract

The absolute measurement of the Earth angular rotation rate with ground-based instruments becomes challenging if the 1 part in $10^9$ of precision has to be obtained. This threshold is important for fundamental physics and for geodesy, to investigate effects of General Relativity and Lorentz violation in the gravity sector and to provide the fast variation of the Earth rotation rate. High sensitivity Ring Laser Gyroscopes (RLG) are currently the only promising technique to achieve this task in the near future, but their precision has been so far limited by systematics related to the laser operation. In this paper we analyze two different sets of observations, each of them three days long. They were obtained from the G ring laser at the Geodetic Observatory Wettzell. The applied method has been developed for the GINGERINO ring laser in order to identify and extract the laser systematics. For the available data sets the residuals show mostly white noise behavior and the Allan deviation drops below 1 part in $10^9$ after an integration time of about $10^4$~s.