In this Issue . . .

Articles:
NIST Physicist Shares Nobel Prize
Kammer Confirmed As NIST Director
New Material Likes The Layered Look
Awards Speed Up R&D Process
A Fresh Look at Train Fire Safety
Machines Team Up for Waste Removal
Composite Beams for Better Bridges

Co-op Corner:
Technology Partnerships
Computer Security
Polishing Tool

NIST Physicist Shares Nobel Prize

NIST Fellow William D. Phillips has been selected as a co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics. (See photo above.) Phillips shared the award with Steven Chu of Stanford University and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Collège de France and École Normale Supérieure of Paris.

The Royal Swedish Academy selected the trio for work they did independently on the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. Phillips is the first NIST employee to win the Nobel Prize in the agency’s history.

“I am thrilled to share in this prize,” said Phillips. “My colleagues in this field have influenced me profoundly and given me an enormous amount of help and stimulation. The research honored by this prize is the result of a huge effort by many other people. The vitality of the research environment at NIST and the scientific quality of my group have been essential to what we have accomplished.”

Phillips began his work on laser cooling methods shortly after arriving at NIST in 1978. The technique involves focusing intersecting beams of laser light on a cloud of gas atoms under high vacuum. The laser radiation gently “pushes” on the atoms from opposite directions until the atoms come to a virtual standstill. In the late 1980s, Phillips’ research team demonstrated that laser cooling could refrigerate atoms well below the then-accepted limits, down to a few micoKelvins, or just a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Phillips and his colleagues at NIST in both Gaithersburg, Md., and Boulder, Colo., are continuing to study ultra-cold trapped atoms with the goal of pushing the frontiers of precision measurement. Their work has led to improved accuracy for atomic clocks, to the creation of the Bose-Einstein condensates or “superatoms,” and to new fields of study, including atom optics and atom lasers. It also may have future application in the development of more sensitive gyroscopes for navigation and atom imaging systems for fabricating ultra-small electronic components. Contact: Katharine Gebbie, (301) 975-4200. See also http://physics.nist.gov/News/contents.html

Kammer Confirmed As NIST Director

Following U.S. Senate confirmation, Raymond Kammer has been sworn in as NIST’s 11th director. Kammer, 50, was nominated by President Clinton in September to succeed Arati Prabhakar, who resigned in March to join the private sector.

Kammer, the deputy director of NIST (from 1980 to 1991 and from 1993 to the present), most recently has been serving on an acting basis as chief financial officer, assistant secretary for administration, and chief information officer for the Department of Commerce. From 1991 to 1993, Kammer was deputy under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, the chief operating officer of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He began his career with Commerce in 1969 as a program analyst. Prior to his appointment as NIST deputy director, Kammer held a number of management positions at NIST and Commerce involving budgetary and program analysis, planning, and personnel management. During his tenure as NIST deputy director, he also served as acting director of NIST, acting director of the National Measurement Laboratory, and acting director of the Advanced Technology Program.

Contact: Public and Business Affairs, (301) 975-2762.

New Material Likes the Layered Look

Mix a large group of middle school boys and girls at a dance and they will naturally align themselves—boys on one side, girls on the other. NIST metallurgy and ceramics researchers have found two different forms of a material that will do the same thing in orderly fashion. When two types of barium-titanium-iron-oxide with different crystal structures and different concentrations of iron are mixed, the two forms naturally align themselves into magnetic and non-magnetic layers.

The researchers are hoping that the layered materials may be useful for several applications, including heads for reading magnetic data on computer disk drives, high-density magnetic data storage, and focusing elements for neutron beams. Recently read heads made with many precisely sized layers of magnetic/non-magnetic materials have come on the market that are more sensitive to magnetic spin changes and thus can read data bits packed more closely together. Currently, these high-tech read heads are made by an expensive process in which each layer is sputtered onto a surface. In such artificial multilayers it is difficult to control the structure of interfaces. The new oxide material may provide a less expensive, more uniform way to make these layered structures.

NIST researchers found that by heating mixtures of BaO-TiO2-Fe2O3 with different ratios of components, they could produce new materials with alternating magnetic and non-magnetic layers of varying thicknesses. The colorized transmission electron micrograph above shows an example of one of the layered structures. The blue layers are a non-magnetic phase (BaTiO3) and are about 2.1 nm thick. The red layers are a magnetic, iron-rich phase and are about 0.9 nm thick. Contact: Leo Bendersky, (301) 975-6167.

Awards Speed Up R&D Process

Cost-shared awards provided by NIST’s Advanced Technology Program directly to industry are reducing the technology development cycle by about 50 percent, according to a new study of early ATP award winners.

Most companies surveyed estimated that participation in the ATP reduced a typical 6-year technology development process to 3 years, with an economic impact of 1 million to several billions of dollars for a single year of time saved.

The results are documented in a detailed survey of 28 teams funded by the ATP in 1991. Eighty-four percent of the interviewees expected that the time savings in R&D would be carried forward through product development, production, and marketing, enabling them to move the new technology into the marketplace more quickly.

Details of the study, conducted by industry consultant Frances Laidlaw, are provided in Acceleration of Technology Development by the Advanced Technology Program: The Experience of 28 Projects Funded in 1991 (NISTIR-6047). Copies of the report are available from the ATP Economic Assessment Office, (301) 975-4332, email: atp@nist.gov.

A Fresh Look at Train Fire Safety

©1997 Robert Rathe

When a fire starts in a passenger train compartment, time is of the essence. The design of the compartment—from the materials used for curtains, seats, and carpets to the number of exits and the width of aisles—determines whether passengers will have enough time to exit the train car safely.

As part of a 3-year study of passenger train fire safety requirements for the Federal Railroad Administration (under the direction of the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center), NIST researchers recently conducted full-scale tests in its large-scale fire research facility. Using bags of trash collected from in-service trains, NIST researchers measured heat release rates to better understand the behavior of realistic fires. The researchers are using these measurements with computer models to simulate how fires might spread in actual trains. Because these simulations take materials interactions and the size and arrangement of railway cars into account, they often can produce more realistic predictions of fire spread than materials testing alone.

In the photo above, NIST fire protection engineer David Stroup uses an infrared camera to explore details of fire spread and burning of a trash fire set near train seats. Colors on the video monitor in the foreground are related to temperatures. White areas in the flame are hottest, followed by red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.

Even when exposed to very intense, direct flames, these train seats charred rather than igniting and feeding the fire. In real world situations, these high-performance materials help slow the spread of fire, allowing more time for passengers to safely leave a burning train car. Contact: Richard Peacock, (301) 975-6664.

Machines Team Up for Waste Removal

GreyPilgrim LLC, a Menlo Park, Calif., robotics startup, has teamed with NIST to prototype an innovative, remotely operated system for cleaning out underground nuclear waste storage tanks.

The system combines the NIST-developed RoboCrane—a mobile, spider-like crane that wields cargo or tooling platforms while positioning them with millimeter-level accuracy—with GreyPilgrim’s EMMA (for Easily Manipulated Mechanical Armature). EMMA is a long-reach manipulator, or robotic arm, that resembles an elephant’s trunk in both appearance and dexterity. (See photo below.) Its movements are controlled by a set of steel cables that activate individual stages in the arm. A 10-meter version is being evaluated now at a NIST testbed. The arm supports a 45-kilogram payload at full reach and carries a waste retrieval hose and an ultra-high-pressure waterjet for dislodging stubborn waste.

©1997 Robert Rathe

Smaller EMMA prototypes have been demonstrated successfully with NIST’s 6-meter-tall RoboCrane. The unique crane provides a stable base that permits EMMA to move around inside a tank and to perform cleanup tasks. For nuclear waste retrieval, a 14- to 24-meter EMMA would be mounted to a larger version of the RoboCrane—big enough to straddle even underground tanks, which measure about 23 meters across and, therefore, avoid exerting forces on tanks of unknown structural integrity.

The collaboration also provides NIST with an opportunity to refine advanced intelligent control concepts and to advance standards and measurement techniques for intelligent machine systems.

Contact: Roger Bostelman, (301) 975-3426, or Robert Kent, (800) 365-3352. See also http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/projects/robocrane/

Composite Beams for Better Bridges

Composites (hybrids of two or more materials) are attractive for infrastructure applications—bridges, buildings, and other large structures—because they are lightweight and resistant to rust and corrosion. Unfortunately, they also are expensive and difficult to engineer into structures of appropriate shape and size with adequate stiffness.

Strongwell Corp., Bristol, Va., is designing and manufacturing bridge beams made of polymer composites that consist of glass and carbon fibers bound by a resin, which should last longer and be maintained more easily than the concrete and steel now used. Strongwell is using co-funding from the Advanced Technology Program to enhance the mechanical properties of the material, optimize beam shape, and establish design standards and load capacities. Working with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the company has designed and manufactured an 8-inch-high prototype bridge beam and continues to work toward production of a 36-inch-high beam.

The project has attracted the interest of transportation officials in a number of states. In an offshoot to the ATP project, 24 subscale beams were installed successfully in the replacement of the Tom’s Creek Bridge in Blacksburg, Va., making it one of the first U.S. vehicular bridges to use hybrid composites as the primary load-bearing structure. Long-term field tests will indicate whether taxpayers can reap the expected benefits of reduced fabrication, installation, and maintenance costs and fewer traffic delays associated with bridge repair and replacement.

Contact: Glenn Barefoot, (540) 645-8052.

Not Your Average Reference Materials

NIST has added to its list of unusual standard reference materials. Organics in Freeze-Dried Mussel Tissue (SRM 2974) and Ocean Sediment (Radioactivity) (SRM 4357) are now available to help researchers ensure the accuracy of measurements and better monitor the health of the ocean and its inhabitants. NIST scientists chose mussels from Boston Harbor for the new mussel tissue SRM to help marine biologists accurately assess pollution in marine life. The freeze-dried mussel tissue SRM includes certified values for 47 toxic pollutants. To make the ocean sediment SRM, radioactive materials were dredged from the Irish Sea and diluted with Chesapeake Bay sediments. Working with the United Kingdom’s National Radiological Protection Board and 20 laboratories around the world, NIST helped certify radioactivity levels for 10 natural and manmade radionuclides. The SRM will help accurately monitor radiation levels in ocean beds such as the Arctic, where nuclear reactors from submarines have been disposed. Contact: SRM Program, (301) 975-6776.

The Hunt for Interstellar Iron

If you’re hunting for something in the vast emptiness of space between the stars, it helps to have some idea where to look. Researchers at NIST, Oxford University, and the University of Bonn recently made some very precise measurements of absorption spectra for iron deuteride (FeD2) that should help astronomers in their quest to find the element iron in the cosmos. While iron is a fairly common element on Earth, it’s never been documented in interstellar space. The researchers used a technique called laser magnetic resonance spectroscopy to make exacting measurements of far-infrared light absorbed by FeD2 during “vibrational bending.” The measurements are the highest frequency, far-infrared spectra of this type ever recorded. The team modified a spectrometer to allow measurements at frequencies as high as 9 terahertz. The improved instrument also should be useful for measuring the so called “fine structure spectra” of chlorine monoxide, which is an important molecule in the atmospheric chemistry of ozone depletion. Contact: Kenneth Evenson, (303) 497-5129.

Four Companies Win Baldrige Award

Two manufacturers—one for a second time—and two service firms have won the 1997 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for their achievements in quality and business performance. The awards, announced by President Clinton and Department of Commerce Secretary William Daley in October went to: 3M Dental Products Division, St. Paul, Minn. (manufacturing); Solectron Corp., Milpitas, Calif. (manufacturing); Merrill Lynch Credit Corp., Jacksonville, Fla. (service); and Xerox Business Services, Rochester, N.Y. (service). Solectron also won the award in the manufacturing category in 1991. Congress established the Baldrige Award in 1987; the first awards were presented in 1988. The award's goals are to enhance U.S. competitiveness by promoting quality awareness, recognize quality and business achievements of U.S. companies, and publicize these companies' successful performance. It is not given for specific products or services. For further information, visit the Baldrige website at http://www.quality.nist.gov or call (301) 975-2036.

Pass the DNA Chips

They’re not too tasty with onion dip, but DNA chips may revolutionize disease diagnosis, DNA sequencing, environmental sampling, and other analytical jobs. DNA chips are tiny integrated devices that use fragments of “unzipped” DNA strands to quickly identify bacteria, viruses, or genetic disease “markers.” To support this emerging technology (as well as a group of Advanced Technology Program awards on Tools for DNA Diagnostics), NIST scientists are studying the fundamental molecular structure of DNA chip components. NIST scientists construct DNA chips from single-stranded DNA molecules that are attached on one end to a gold surface. The surface-tethered DNA then can bind with complementary small fragments of single-stranded DNA from a sample. The NIST research has helped industry better understand how the DNA molecules assemble on a surface and how to obtain the best coverage of DNA for better sensitivity. DNA chips could become the basis for very fast sensors to diagnose bacterial infections in blood samples, to identify E. Coli in ground beef, or check water samples for pfiesteria piscicida. Contact: Michael Tarlov, (301) 975-2058.

Technology Partnerships—Transgenic tobacco that can help produce human insulin, information technologies that bring artificial common sense to Internet searches, and innovative manufacturing and materials technologies are among the goals sought in 64 new industrial research projects announced recently by NIST’s Advanced Technology Program. The awards are the result of seven ATP competitions conducted in 1997. The majority of the awards, 48, went to small businesses either for single company projects or as the lead company in an industry joint venture. Contact: NIST Public and Business Affairs, (301) 975-2758.

Computer Security—NIST and the National Security Agency have established the National Information Assurance Partnership. The partnership will employ the latest techniques to develop product specification tools, testing methods, and tests so that testing laboratories and organizations—as well as consumers and producers of information technology products—will have objective measures for evaluating security products and systems. The NIAP has several goals, including promoting demand and investment in security-enhanced products; moving current evaluation and testing efforts from the federal government to accredited, private-sector laboratories; and fostering research and development in security tests, test methods, and metrics. Contact: Arnold Johnson, (301) 975-3247.

Polishing Tool—Rodel Inc., Newark, Del., recently licensed a NIST invention for “lapping” and polishing high-precision parts. In a cooperative research effort with NIST, the University of Delaware, and six other organizations, the company plans to evaluate the tool's effectiveness for polishing photomasks used in making computer chips. The NIST system includes a porous ceramic form covered in a thin film, which can be replaced in seconds. This offers flexibility for small batch production and good repeatability for higher volume production. The ceramic substrate, overlying thin film, and abrasive can be tailored to a particular material or workpiece. In tests, the system removed material from glass, silicon, copper, and other workpieces at significantly better than average rates, while achieving high-quality surfaces. Contact: Chris Evans, (301) 975-3484.

About Technology at a Glance:

NIST is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Technology Administration. NIST promotes U.S. economic growth by working with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements, and standards. Technology at a Glance is produced by Public and Business Affairs, A903 Administration Bldg., NIST, Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-0001. Any mention of commercial products is for information only; it does not imply recommendation or endorsement by NIST. Technology at a Glance Editor: Gail Porter, (301) 975-3392, email: gail.porter@nist.gov. For patent information, call (301) 975-3084.