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Materials

Materials characterization

News and Updates

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Avoiding the Crack of Doom

February 25, 2019

Just as a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, the deformations and fractures that cause catastrophic failure in materials begin with a few...

After 90 Years, a Better Way to Measure the Composition of Paper

February 14, 2019

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO), have developed a...

White Cat Hair on Black Pants: International Study Measures Stability of Precision Masses to Benefit Trade

November 26, 2018

When are two nominally identical kilogram masses no longer identical? When each goes to a different place and adsorbs varying amounts of moisture and...

New NIST Instrument Will Give Scientists a Window on Change at the Nanoscale

September 26, 2018

It looks more like a long water main pipe than a microscope, but a new custom-built instrument at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)...

Schematic shows the five layers of a typical automobile composite body. Mar and scratch damages from five objects, seen as cracks and crevices in the coating layers, are marked.

To Improve Auto Coatings, New Tests Do More Than Scratch the Surface

September 20, 2018

Know that sickening feeling when you exit the grocery store and find your car has been banged up by a runaway shopping cart? It may one day be just a bad memory...

Pratt & Whitney Senior Engineer Chris Pellicone (left) with NIST's Bruce Ravel (right) at the Beamline for Material Measurement (BMM)

Industry a key component of newly commissioned NIST beamline at Brookhaven National Laboratory

August 2, 2018

Building off of a nearly 40 year partnership with Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), NIST has recently completed and commissioned the Beamline for Material...

The Shape in Water

July 23, 2018

Tinkering with a method they helped develop over the last few years, scientists have for the first time used it to measure at the nanometer scale the...

Consortium Workshop Highlights TRC Advances

June 21, 2018 - June 22, 2018

Our 2018 NIST/TRC Consortium Workshop has drawn to a close; the consortium is hosted by the Thermodynamics Research Center within Boulder’s Applied Chemicals...

Through a Prism Brightly: A New Way to Measure the Light-Warping Properties of Hyperbolic Metamaterials

June 18, 2018

Manipulating light in a variety of ways—shrinking its wavelength and allowing it to travel freely in one direction while stopping it cold in another--hyperbolic...

Two seated people in bunny suits look at a bluish computer image

NIST Neutron Detection Method: Long-Sought Workaround to Helium Shortage?

June 11, 2018

Doctors use X-rays to see inside people, and scientists use neutrons to peer inside advanced materials and devices such as fuel cells to better understand and...

Technical Support

May 15, 2018

NIST’s nSoft consortium helps product developers solve difficult problems by giving them access to a powerful tool, unlike anything in an industry R&D lab, for...

Illustration of sunlight shining on solar panel covered with nanometer-scale beads.

Psst! A Whispering Gallery for Light Boosts Solar Cells

April 13, 2018

Trapping light with an optical version of a whispering gallery, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a...

Comparison of Future Realizations of the Kilogram - Final Report

March 15, 2018

The Pilot Study — read 2016 article details — was completed in late 2016 and the Final Report was published on the BIPM website in June of 2017. The main...

The image shows two regions with opposing chiral antiferromagnetic domains (gray/black) in the chiral antiferromagnet Mn3Sn.

Study Identifies Metallic Antiferromagnet with Potential for Memory Devices

January 29, 2018

Antiferromagnets have generated significant interest for future computing technologies due to their fast dynamics, their ability to generate and detect spin...

Photo of police officer from behind wearing body armor labeled Police

A New Way to Test Body Armor

October 16, 2017

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new way to investigate the high-performance fibers used in modern body...

Researchers Find New Way to Manipulate Magnetism

September 14, 2017

In a pioneering effort to control, measure and understand magnetism at the atomic level, researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and...

Sub-microscopic LEDs Shed New Light on Advanced Materials

July 12, 2017

One of the persistent challenges in 21 st century metrology is the need to measure ever-more-detailed properties of ever-smaller things, from microchip features...

diagram of perovskite sample examined by the photothermal indued resonance technique

Unexpected Property May Raise Material’s Prospects as Solar Cell

May 22, 2017

Crystalline materials known as perovskites could become the next superstars of solar cells. Over the past few years, researchers have demonstrated that a...

X-rays from Copper Source Set New Gold Standard for Measuring Industrial Materials

May 12, 2017

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have produced and precisely measured a spectrum of X-rays using a new, state-of-the-art...

NIST Invents Fundamental Component for ‘Spintronic’ Computing

April 26, 2017

NIST has been granted a patent for technology that may hasten the advent of a long-awaited new generation of high-performance, low-energy computers....

Getting the Inside Story on Products with Computed Tomography

February 22, 2017

It is often the case that a valuable new industrial capability brings with it a whole new set of challenges for measurement science -- and thus, inevitably, for...

Fracture surface of additive manufactured titanium alloy

NIST Releases Findings from the NIST/ASTM Workshop on Mechanical Behavior of Additive Manufacturing Components

January 6, 2017

The worldwide market for additive manufacturing (AM) products and services is projected to exceed US$6.5 billion by 2019 [1]. Despite this prediction, there are...

Materials Extrusion Additive Manufacturing

NIST Releases Roadmap for Polymer-Based Additive Manufacturing

December 12, 2016

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a high-priority technology growth area for U.S. manufacturers. Innovative AM processes that fabricate parts layer-by-layer...

Man standing behind big silver equipment

Disseminating the New Kilogram: An International ‘Dry Run’

November 28, 2016

When the kilogram, the world’s basic unit of mass, gets a new definition in 2018, it will be based not on a physical artifact but a constant of nature. However...

NIST Unveils Forensic Technique to Measure Mechanical Properties of Evidence

November 1, 2016

You may have seen it on CSI: The star examines hair from a crime scene and concludes its color or texture looks like the defendant’s hair, or maybe his dog’s...

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