NIST Mini-Sensor May Have Biomedical and Security Applications video description for the visually impaired

NIST Mini-Sensor May Have Biomedical and Security Applications video description for the visually impaired (back to video)

Text on screen: NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce

NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Miniature Atomic Clocks and Magnetometers featuring physicist John Kitching

Text on screen: John Kitching, NIST physicist

Kitching: My name is John Kitching, and I am a physicist here at NIST. I am in the Time & Frequency Division, and we build, among other things, very small atomic clocks.

Kitching: This is primarily a fabrication laboratory, and so what we do here is we make a lot of different pieces that go into these atomic clocks. One of the most important components is a very small laser. These are very similar to the lasers that are used in CD players.

Visual: Close up of a microchip. Upright gold pins line the edges on either side of a small grey block in the center. One pair of tweezers holds the chip in place while another moves around the chip's surface.

Kitching: And we mount these on a little substrate to produce the light that is used to interrogate the atoms.

Kitching: Another very important piece of these clocks is the alkali vapor cell, that is, the cell that actually contains the atoms that are used in the atomic clock. That alkali vapor cell, the way that we make those cells was developed here at NIST.

Kitching: It's a new technology, and it enables us to make the clocks very, very small while at the same time retaining all the precision inherent in an atomic clock.

Visual: a hand holding a pair of tweezers removes a small component from a plastic case, carries it over to the microchip and positions it on the chip's surface.

Kitching, sitting in his lab, speaking.

Kitching: So it turns out this miniaturization technology can be used in a number of other different things, and in fact I would say that we are still discovering things we can use it for. One of the very important other devices is a magnetometer. Those are instruments that measure magnetic fields, produced either by the Earth or by metallic objects.

We're developing, again, very small, low-power yet highly sensitive magnetometers for use in a variety of different applications.

Visual: Close up of a chip scale magnetometer, a small device about the size of a grain of rice standing on its end. The magnetometer consists of alternating layers of opaque white crystalline and dark grey materials. Very fine wires connect the magnetometer to the chip surface, which is striped with electrical leads. Two pairs of tweezers move over the surface of the device.

Text on screen: John Kitching, NIST physicist

Kitching: One of the ones that we're really interested in right now is biomagnetism, that is, measuring the magnetic field from the heart or the brain of animals and human beings.

Kitching: This is very important for some types of health care diagnostics, and it's a research area in and of its own. For example, epilepsy is something where diagnostics of brain activity through magnetic imaging can provide a lot of insight.

Text on screen: NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology For more info contact: inquiries [at] nist.gov (inquiries[at]nist[dot]gov)