A probabilistic model for reciprocity failure at an n-atom developable silver speck in a photographic emulsion

The paper studies probabilistic models for high and low intensity reciprocity failure in the photographic emulsion, in which a latent image silver speck must consist of a minimum of ns silver atoms in order to be stable, and nd silver atoms in order to be developable. Previous models for reciprocity failure assumed that ns=nd=2, mainly because of the large increase in complexity (especially in those models which combined high and low intensity failure) in dealing with the situation in which ns and/or nd are larger than 2. In this paper, models for high and low intensity failure are separately studied, and results are obtained for general nd.