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Physical Measurement Laboratory

News and Updates

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Neutron Microscope: Waiting for the Lens to Come

March 30, 2016

When the world's first workhorse neutron microscope – currently being designed and built by a collaboration including NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory...

Multilingual Circuit: NIST's "Optomechanical Transducer" Links Sound, Light and Radio Waves

March 28, 2016

Researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a "piezo-optomechanical circuit" that converts signals among...

NIST Develops First Widely Useful Measurement Standard for Breast Cancer MRI

March 23, 2016

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed the first widely useful standard for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of...

NIST Creates Fundamentally Accurate Quantum Thermometer

March 15, 2016

Better thermometers might be possible as a result of a discovery at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where physicists have found a way...

Images of yeast cells and silver dendrites.

New Microwave Imaging Approach Opens a Nanoscale View on Processes in Liquids

March 15, 2016

U.S. government nanotechnology researchers have demonstrated a new window to view what are now mostly clandestine operations occurring in soggy, inhospitable...

New Tool for Breast Cancer Screening

March 14, 2016

A little over three years ago, NIST scientist Katy Keenan came back from a conference with an ambitious idea: to improve the quality of magnetic resonance...

Not So Fast: Overlooked Resistance May Inflate Estimates of Organic-Semiconductor Performance

March 10, 2016

It's hardly a character flaw, but organic transistors—the kind envisioned for a host of flexible electronics devices—behave less than ideally, or at least not...

NIST's Internet Time Service Serves the World

March 8, 2016

The Internet Time Service operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) serves much of the Earth, with customers from around the globe...

Quantum Spin Squeezing Gets Real

February 26, 2016

Today's atomic clocks are ridiculously accurate. The best of them tell time so well that if they had been running since the Big Bang, by now they would not have...

Getting Hyperspectral Imaging Ready for the Rain Forest

February 24, 2016

Hyperspectral images allow humans to see what otherwise might be invisible. Unlike ordinary cameras, which record information in each of three broad color bands...

Vaccine Fridge Field Study 'Opens Doors' to New Standards

February 23, 2016

Recipients of an annual flu shot may be surprised to learn that there is currently no official standard for vaccine storage equipment in clinics, pharmacies...

Better Accuracy Out of Thin (or Thick) Air

February 17, 2016

NIST scientists have devised and improved a prototype instrument the size of a loaf of bread that can substantially increase the accuracy of length measurements...

Shedding Light on Dark Matter with SQUIDs

February 16, 2016

Perhaps fortunately, most folks haven't noticed that 85% of the Milky Way is missing: The kind of familiar, ordinary matter we know – made up of protons...

Shiny and (Electro)chrome: New Twist on Old Tech Could Bring Living Color at Low Power

February 2, 2016

By marrying state-of-the-art nanometer-scale gratings with a Space Age-era thin-film polymer, researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and...

Transforming Welding with Comprehensive NIST Metrology

February 2, 2016

Welding has been around, in some form, for centuries. Today it enables a large percentage of the U.S. economy,* thanks to its role in the creation of a diverse...

The complete Primary Mirror Backplane Support Structure for the James Webb Space Telescope. The inset shows the location of the four support mounts of the type that NIST measured.

NIST Performs Critical Measurements for James Webb Space Telescope

February 1, 2016

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has accurately measured parts designed for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited...

Thinking Outside the Cuvette: To Measure Dimensions of Skinny Glass Container, PML Scientists Get Creative

February 1, 2016

Let's say you're a biotechnologist working to develop new medicines or a better test for forensic analysis. You might find yourself frequently using absorbance...

New 'Quick Test' Station May Speed Commercialization of Photonic Thermometers

January 29, 2016

Physicists in NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) have been working on a new class of chip-based photonic thermometers that measure temperature with...

Quantum Information Transfer: From Microwaves to Motion to Light

January 28, 2016

When a long-awaited quantum information network finally arrives, in whatever form, it will incorporate two essential technologies: a method of generating and...

HID Lamps: Getting Brighter Faster

January 6, 2016

NIST has been issued a patent for a novel method to improve the performance and utility of the sort of high-intensity discharge (HID) lamps used for stadium and...

NIST Featured in Media's Top Science Stories of 2015

January 6, 2016

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is featured in several of the news media's lists of the top science stories of 2015. NIST's change at...

Colorized micrograph of a NIST single-photon detector

Less Jitter, More Bits: New Material for Detecting Photons Captures More Quantum Information

January 5, 2016

Detecting individual particles of light just got a bit more precise—by 74 picoseconds to be exact—thanks to advances in materials by National Institute of...

PML Expertise and Collaborations Lead to Portable Test Solution for Laser Trackers

December 28, 2015

A collaboration between NIST researchers and a private-sector firm has led to development of a commercial device to fill a critical need in industry: field...

Ringing in a New Way to Measure and Modulate Trapped Light

December 22, 2015

Researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a novel way to noninvasively measure and map how and where...

'Squeezed' Motion in a Massive Object

December 22, 2015

Everyone expects objects at the atomic scale to follow the weird rules of quantum mechanics. But in the past few years, scientists at NIST and elsewhere have...

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