Study on the Impurity Effect in the Realization of Silver Fixed Point

Abstract

The application of a thermal analysis model to estimate the temperature depression from the ideal fixed-point temperature is important, especially when the chemical analysis of the sample in a cell is insufficient or the cell might have been contaminated during fabrication. This study extends previous work, on thermal analysis with the tin point, to an investigation of the impurity dependence of the silver-point temperature. Close agreement was found between the temperature depression ($-0.36$ mK) inferred from the thermal analysis of the measured fixed-point plateau and the temperature depression ($-0.32$ mK) inferred using the sum of individual estimates (SIE) method with an impurity analysis based on glow discharge mass spectrometry. Additionally, the results of the thermal analysis manifest no significant dependence on the rate of solidification, and the scatter of observed gradients was within 0.36 mK among five plateaux with different temperature settings of the furnace. Although the results support the application of both the SIE method and thermal analysis for the silver point, further experiments with cell-to-cell comparisons linked to thermal analysis, a study of the thermometer-furnace systematic effects, the oxygen effect, and the locus of the freezing plateau should be investigated to reach a firm conclusion.