What is it about?

Libbrecht and Libbrecht ran their sensor too hot, which made nonsense of one of their performance claims,as well as being inconsistent with previous practice.

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Why is it important?

There was nothing unique in the comment, it just reiterated previous practice with a bit of backing detail. The backing detail reflected an experience I'd had with thermistors around 2002, where an automated calibration rig had pushed the dissipation in a particular thermistor high enough to make its resistance visibly unstable (though it didn't move around much). I took the chance to point out that negative resistance devices can form "hot channels" if you dissipate enough power in them - I've seen it done with carbon film resistors - and that this might be why early publication on using thermistors as precise temperaturehad emphasised that you ought to keep the power dissipation low if you wanted good stability.

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This page is a summary of: Comment on “A versatile thermoelectric temperature controller with 10 mK reproducibility and 100 mK absolute accuracy” [Rev. Sci. Instrum. 80, 126107 (2009)], Review of Scientific Instruments, February 2011, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/1.3534845.
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