Establishment of the platinum-iridium kilogram mass standards at NMIJ after the Extraordinary Calibrations

The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures has carried out calibrations of the platinumiridium kilogram mass standards by referencing the international prototype of the kilogram for the first time since the third periodic verification of national prototypes of the kilogram was carried out in 1988-92. This calibration campaign was designated 'Extraordinary Calibrations' in the second phase, in which two platinum-iridium kilogram mass standards of the National Metrology Institute of Japan were calibrated with a standard uncertainty of 3.5 mu g. By adding these new calibration data into our data sets from 1991, we established our mass unit with a standard uncertainty of 3.3 mu g by least-squares analysis using an exponential model, which is useful for compensating for mass increase after cleaning the mass standards. Moreover, it was found that our established mass unit following the Extraordinary Calibrations shifted against our previously maintained mass unit by -20.8 mu g as of the beginning of 2015. The analysis with a linear model revealed that the amount of mass increase over time of some standards was significantly smaller than that suggested at the third periodic verification of national prototypes of the kilogram. The analysis with the exponential model gave an exponent of 0.217 with a standard uncertainty of 0.057. This suggests that the mass increase due to surface contamination cannot be explained by a diffusion-limited process.