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Jena - St.Petersburg

Database of Optical Constants


(JPDOC)






Some basic information:

What is in the database?
How is the database organized?
How to submit your data?
Who created the database?



You can
enter the database
without reading its description below.

If the connection is slow, you can try a mirror site available.




Information on the database:


What is in the database?

The database contains references to the papers, data files and links to the Internet resources related to measurements and calculations of the optical constants in the wavelength interval from X-rays to radio domain. The materials considered are amorphous and crystalline silicates of different kinds, various ices, oxides, sulfides, carbides, carbonaceous species from amorphous carbon to graphite and diamonds and some other materials of astrophysical and terrestrial atmosphere interests.

We have comprised about 700 references to the papers, books, dissertations where the refractive index, reflectance, transmittance, mass absorption coefficient, etc were derived. Most of the papers were published from the 60s till 1999.
  Evidently, it was impossible for us to cite all the papers, in particular for such materials as water ice, quartz, MgO, carbon. In first turn, we paid attention to astronomically interesting papers and to papers not included in recent reviews (though the majority of the papers referred by us were mentioned in the reviews). The lists of collected references for materials have a different degree of complitness since the work is still in progress.

Filling the database was started with the data available for us. They are the optical constants measured in the laboratory of the Astrophysical Institute of the Friedrich Schiller University (Jena) as well as the data obtained in the former Soviet Union before 1974 (when it joined the international copyright agreement) and some often used freely accessible data.
  The data we included are presented in their initial format (table or figure) and in our standard tabular format. In some cases we also give plots (refractive index vs wavelength, dielectric permittivity vs energy) and an information on how the data were derived, what equipment was used and what samples were considered.
  The service codes of the database allow one to transfer the data from our standard format to a desirable form (refractive index/dielectric permittivity vs wavelength/wavenumber/energy tables with numbers given in any format). Our scattering codes based on Mie theory and separation of variables method for spheroids give the possibility easily to transform the data into cross-sections, single scattering albedo and so on.

References to some useful books and reviews on the subject (e.g. the classical handbooks edited by E.D.Palik) and links to Internet collections of optical constants and personal WWW pages with related software were also placed in the database.

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How is the database organized?

You have arrived at our welcome page. It contains a link to the homepage of the database, which gives a list of material groups (silicates, oxides and so on) and a description of related topics (Internet resources, books, etc).

Each group of materials has its own page that includes a table whose columns show: the state of the material (amorphous, crystalline, glassy), the quantity measured or calculated (refractive index, reflectance, etc), the form of the data (table, figure), the considered wavelength range (in microns), and reference to the paper.

When the data in a paper were available we created a corresponding HTML page and supplied the table of references with a link to the page. Such a page can contain links to data and graphic files, information about the paper (e.g. its ADS abstract), a description of how the data were derived and so on.

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How to submit your data?

We plan to continue filling in the database and developing its service. Certainly, many good papers and related Internet resources were missed by us. Therefore, we shall be very thankful to anyone who could send us more references, data files, links to be included in the database or permission to use his/her data. Any comments and remarks are also welcome.

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Who created the database?

The database was developed by several persons at the Astrophysical Institute of the Friedrich Schiller University (Jena, Germany) and the Astronomical Institute of the St.Petersburg University (Russia).
The work was supported by a grant of the Volkswagen Foundation (Germany) and partly by the "Universities of Russia - Fundamental researches" program (Russia).

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Created by V.I., N.K.
Last modified: 09/02/00, V.I.