Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Frequency dependence of capacitance standards

Published

Author(s)

Yicheng Wang

Abstract

We measured the frequency dependence of a 10 pF transportable fused-silica capacitor from 50 Hz to 20 kHz. The results have a relative standard uncertainty of 0.32x10^(-6), 0.15x10^(-6), and 0.37x10(-6) at 100 Hz, 400 Hz, and 20 kHz, respectively. This will lead to improvements in the capacitance calibration services at NIST by a factor of three or four. For this work, we used two reference capacitors. The first reference was a 1 pF cross capacitor chosen for its negligible frequency dependence at low frequencies. (Conventional capacitors are frequency dependent at low frequencies because of films on electrode surfaces.) The second reference was a 10 pF nitrogen-filled capacitor chosen because it has a very small inductance, thereby reducing problems at higher frequencies.
Citation
Review of Scientific Instruments
Volume
74
Issue
9

Citation

Wang, Y. (2003), Frequency dependence of capacitance standards, Review of Scientific Instruments, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=31304 (Accessed April 23, 2024)
Created September 1, 2003, Updated January 27, 2020