Each issue of Philosophical Transactions A is devoted to a specific area of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences. This area will define a research frontier that is advancing rapidly, often bridging traditional disciplines.
All articles are peer reviewed and edited to the highest standards. We currently publish 24 issues per year and, along with all Royal Society journals, we are committed to archiving and providing perpetual access.
A minority of our issues are also derived from Royal Society Discussion Meetings. For more information about submitting a proposal for a potential Theme Issue, please see our guidelines.
Articles submitted to the journal must not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Furthermore, the main findings of the article should not have been reported in the mass media. Like many journals, Philosophical Transactions A employs a strict embargo policy where the reporting of a scientific article by the media is embargoed until a specific time. The Editor has final authority in all matters relating to publication.
The Royal Society, the national academy of science of the UK and the Commonwealth, is at the cutting edge of scientific progress.
We support many top young scientists, engineers and technologists, influence science policy, debate scientific issues with the public and much more. We are an independent, charitable body which derives our authoritative status from over 1400 Fellows and Foreign Members.
A far-wing line shape theory based on the binary collision and quasistatic approximations that is applicable for both the low- and high-frequency wings of the vibration-rotational bands has been developed. This theory has been applied in order to calculate the frequency and temperature dependence of the continuous absorption coefficient for frequencies up to 10,000 cm−1 for pure H2O and for H2O-N2 mixtures. The calculations were made assuming an interaction potential consisting of an isotropic Lennard-Jones part with two parameters that are consistent with values obtained from other data, and the leading long-range anisotropic part, together with the measured line strengths and transition frequencies. The results, obtained without the introduction of adjustable parameters, compare well with the existing laboratory data, both in magnitude and in temperature dependence. This leads us to the conclusion that the water continuum can be explained in terms of far-wing absorption. Current work in progress to extend the theory and to validate the theoretically calculated continuum will be discussed briefly
