Molar standards & information units in the 'new-SI'

P Fraundorf (1) , Melanie Lipp (1)

1 University of Missouri [St. Louis]

In a 2015 paper, Mohr and Phillips point out practical ambiguities associated with the treatment of dimensionless units in the SI, with an eye toward helping scientists to address these in the future. In particular the two fundamental constants " related to counting " , namely Avogadro's number NA and Boltzmann's constant kB, in the proposed new SI will serve primarily as scaling relations between dimensionless quantities. We show here that the role of molar heat capacity as a multiplicity exponent gives to the numerical value chosen for kB a natural connection to information units, like bits. At the same time, the promise of graphene (e.g. in nanotube form) as a portable molar and mass standard (thanks to its small intersheet-bonding mass deficit) suggests a natural connection between the numerical value chosen for NA and well-defined graphene structures, including a particular graphite armchair hex-prism.

Mots clés: Boltzmann constant; Avogadro constant; information units; molar standards

Domaines: Chimie analytique; Physique Générale [physics.gen-ph]; Matériaux

P Fraundorf, Melanie Lipp. Molar standards & information units in the 'new-SI'. 2016. ⟨hal-01381003⟩