In this work, the liquidus temperature of tin was determined by melting the sample using the pressure-controlled loop heat pipe. Square wave-type pressure steps generated periodic 0.7 °C temperature steps in the isothermal region in the vicinity of the tin sample, and the tin was melted with controllable heat pulses from the generated temperature changes. The melting temperatures at specific melted fractions were measured, and they were extrapolated to the melted fraction of unity to determine the liquidus temperature of tin. To investigate the influence of the impurity distribution on the melting behavior, a molten tin sample was solidified by an outward slow freezing or by quenching to segregate the impurities inside the sample with concentrations increasing outwards or to spread the impurities uniformly, respectively. The measured melting temperatures followed the local solidus temperature variations well in the case of the segregated sample and stayed near the solidus temperature in the quenched sample due to the microscopic melting behavior. The extrapolated melting temperatures of the segregated and quenched samples were 0.95 mK and 0.49 mK higher than the outside-nucleated freezing temperature of tin (with uncertainties of 0.15 mK and 0.16 mK, at approximately 95% level of confidence), respectively. The extrapolated melting temperature of the segregated sample was supposed to be a closer approximation to the liquidus temperature of tin, whereas the quenched sample yielded the possibility of a misleading extrapolation to the solidus temperature. Therefore, the determination of the liquidus temperature could result in different extrapolated melting temperatures depending on the way the impurities were distributed within the sample, which has implications for the contemporary methodology for realizing temperature fixed points of the International Temperature Scale of 1990 (ITS-90).

No abstract

No abstract

The triple-point temperature of neon, T tp−Ne , is known to have dependence on the isotopic composition. Recently, the Technical Annex for the International Temperature Scale of 1990 was updated to specify the method of correction for the isotopic reference ratio of neon. In this study, to confirm this correction in the Technical Annex independently, the effects of the isotopic composition of neon on T tp−Ne for three commercial neon gas sources were studied. For the measurement of the isotopic composition, a gas mass spectrometer was used to compare the sample gases with a reference neon gas whose isotopic composition was known with high precision by a gravimetric method. For the measurement of T tp−Ne , an open-cell type cryostat for the realization of low-temperature fixed points was used. The physical cell and the thermal environment around it remained very similar for all T tp−Ne measurements with the neon gases due to the nature of the open-cell type system. Therefore, the difference in T tp−Ne among different samples could be measured with a relatively low uncertainty, canceling many systematic effects that are common to all measurements. Our result was consistent with the correction in the Technical Annex. Furthermore, because one of the commercial neon gases was the bottle that was used for KRISS measurements in the international comparison CCT-K2, it is now possible to correct the measurement for the reference isotopic ratio and compare it with other measurements for which isotopic composition data are available.