A specially designed dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) cell and associated equipment has been used to carry out precise measurements of electrical energy, E g , dissipated per discharge cycle of the applied ac voltage, V a over the frequency range 5 ⩽ f ⩽ 50 kHz. Twin pairs of several different dielectric materials (2.54 cm diameter discs, thicknesses = 2.0 or ca. 0.1 mm) with relative permittivities between 2.1 ⩽ ′ K ⩽ 9.5 were used as dielectric barriers in DBDs of four different gases: He, Ne, Ar and N 2 . Much of the work relates to the study of atmospheric pressure glow discharge (APGD) plasma in flowing He gas; five separate thermometers (including fiber-optic probes immune to high voltage and high-frequency electromagnetic fields) have enabled us to perform a detailed calorimetric (heat balance) investigation in He APGD, believed to be the first of its kind. Fair agreement in the overall energy balance, which includes vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) light emission, lends strong support to the validity of both measurements and methodology. The latter includes refined algorithms that permit rapid data acquisition and processing. The present results are compared with literature, allowing several important conclusions/recommendations to emerge.

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A first generation of parallel scanning tunneling microscopy ͑STM͒ simulator has been developed to accelerate the production of high quality STM images. An efficient master-slave parallel scheme has been constructed specially suited for large scale problems in which the amount of data communications remains a small fraction of the entire calculation. We apply the new parallel scheme to two examples, benzene adsorption on a metal surface and standing wave patterns on the Cu͑111͒ surface, highlighting the efficiency of our approach.

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