Robley C. Williams

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.

A new formulation is presented of the static relative permittivity or dielectric constant of water and steam, including supercooled and supercritical states. The range is from 238 K to 873 K, at pressures up to 1200 MPa. The formulation is based on the ITS-90 temperature scale. It correlates a selected set of data from a recently published collection of all experimental data. The set includes new data in the liquid water and the steam regions that have not been part of earlier correlations. The physical basis for the formulation is the so-called g-factor in the form proposed by Harris and Alder. An empirical 12-parameter form for the g-factor as a function of the independent variables temperature and density is used. For the conversion of experimental pressures to densities, the newest formulation of the equation of state of water on the ITS-90, prepared by Wagner and Pruss, has been used. All experimental data are compared with the formulation. The reliability of the new formulation is assessed in all subregions. Comparisons with previous formulations are presented. Auxiliary dielectric-constant formulations as functions of temperature are included for the saturated vapor and liquid states. The pressure and temperature derivatives of the dielectric constant and the Debye–Hückel limiting-law slopes are calculated, their reliability is estimated, and they are compared with experimentally derived values and with previous correlations. All equations are given in this paper, along with short tables. An implementation of this formulation for the dielectric constant is available on disk [A. H. Harvey, A. P. Peskin, and S. A. Klein, NIST/ASME Steam Properties, NIST Standard Reference Database 10, Version 2.1, Standard Reference Data Program, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD (1997)].

The factors which determine image contrast in optical and electron micrographs are discussed in relation to a new metal shadow-casting technique whereby the contrast of images is greatly increased by depositing obliquely a thin film of metal on the microscope preparations. Further advantages of the use of shadow-casting are described, and an estimate is made of the lower limit of size of objects which should be observable by shadow-casting. Examples are given and illustrations are shown of the applications of this technique to the electron micrography of particles of macromolecular dimensions, of replicas of such particles, and of surface replicas prepared in several ways.