Intercomparison of Nine National High-vacuum Standards under the Auspices of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures

The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures has initiated world-wide intercomparisons of pressure standards. The intercomparison in the regime of very low pressures, i.e. 10-4 to 1 Pa, using Ar as the test gas, has now been completed with the participation of laboratories in nine countries (in alphabetical order): Czechoslovakia, Federal Republic of Germany, France, India, Italy, Japan, People's Republic of China, UK and United States of America. In addition, five of these laboratories made measurements using H2 as the test gas. Four spinning-rotor gauges were employed as transfer standards. The achieved transfer uncertainty between the pilot laboratory (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt) and a participating laboratory lies between 0.16% and 0.30% (1σ) for Ar and has allowed an intercomparison at this level of accuracy. At all investigated pressures the standards in the various laboratories lie within an interval of ±3% around the standard of the pilot laboratory. For a brief synopsis of the intercomparison results, the calibration data of each laboratory for one gas species are reduced to a single number, i.e., the average over the pressure range 10-3 to 1 Pa, although this procedure is somewhat arbitrary and obscures scatter and pressure-dependence of some calibration results. These averages deviate from their mean by not more than about 1%. Systematic deviations between some laboratories are clearly identifiable: however, for most of the laboratories it appears that these are compatible with the estimated uncertainties of the pressure generation and the transfer uncertainty.