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Physics

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NIST Atomic Clocks Now Keep Time Well Enough to Improve Models of Earth

November 28, 2018

Experimental atomic clocks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have achieved three new performance records, now ticking precisely...

New Device Widens Light Beams by 400 Times, Broadening Possibilities in Science and Technology

November 27, 2018

By using light waves instead of electric current to transmit data, photonic chips—circuits for light—have advanced fundamental research in many areas from...

Photonic Radiation Sensors Survive Huge Doses Undamaged

November 27, 2018

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have published landmark test results that suggest a promising class of sensors can be...

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New Research Center to Explore Spintronics Materials for Advanced Computing

November 5, 2018

GAITHERSBURG, Md.—The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its partners in the Nanoelectronic Computing...

JILA Researchers See Signs of Interactive Form of Quantum Matter

October 31, 2018

JILA researchers have, for the first time, isolated groups of a few atoms and precisely measured their multi-particle interactions within an atomic clock. The...

A New Way to Measure Nearly Nothing

October 19, 2018

Many semiconductor fabricators and research labs are under increasing pressure from, of all things, vacuum. These facilities need to remove greater amounts of...

NIST Launches Consortium to Support Development of Quantum Industry

September 28, 2018

GAITHERSBURG, Md.—The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has signed a cooperative research and development...

NIST’s Electro-Optic Laser Pulses 100 Times Faster Than Usual Ultrafast Light

September 27, 2018

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used common electronics to build a laser that pulses 100 times more often than...

Uncrunching the Frequency Spectrum

September 26, 2018

The squeeze is here, and the crunch is coming. Soon. Explosive demand for high-speed wireless communication is placing growing pressure on the limited frequency...

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A Novel Graphene Quantum Dot Structure Takes the Cake

August 23, 2018

In a marriage of quantum science and solid-state physics, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used magnetic fields to...

Helping the Microchip Industry Go (Very Low) with the Flow

August 22, 2018

A new study by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has uncovered a source of error in an industry-standard calibration...

Skeleton of bright green and yellow with some pink and dark blue

NIST Shows Laser Ranging Can ‘See’ 3D Objects Melting in Fires

August 8, 2018

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used a laser detection and ranging (LADAR) system to image three-dimensional (3D)...

NIST Chip Lights Up Optical Neural Network Demo

July 26, 2018

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have made a silicon chip that distributes optical signals precisely across a miniature...

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...

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...

A New Way to Measure Energy in Microscopic Machines

June 8, 2018

What drives cells to live and engines to move? It all comes down to a quantity that scientists call “free energy,” essentially the energy that can be extracted...

Cartoon with man standing on falling blue cube representing Earth, decorated with clumps of clock faces, with yellow sun at right.

NIST Atomic Clock Comparison Confirms Key Assumptions of ‘Einstein’s Elevator’

June 4, 2018

By comparing different types of remote atomic clocks, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have performed the most accurate...

Convective Accelerometer

May 24, 2018

NIST’s Michael Gaitan and his colleagues patented a new type of acceleration sensor in the late 1990s. Known as the “convective accelerometer,” it uses heated...

NIST Puts the Optical Microscope Under the Microscope to Achieve Atomic Accuracy

May 22, 2018

Over the last two decades, scientists have discovered that the optical microscope can be used to detect, track and image objects much smaller than their...

Neutrons by the Numbers

May 21, 2018

After years of research, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed and demonstrated a way to count the absolute...

Man standing working on a silicon carbide device

NIST Electronics Engineer Named Service to America Medal Finalist

May 7, 2018

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researcher Allen R. Hefner, Jr., has been named a finalist for the 2018 Samuel J. Heyman Service to...

The Secret Lives of Roots: Watching Crops Grow Beneath the Surface with Portable MRI

May 1, 2018

Nobody really knows what plant roots are doing when they’re at home. Digging up a plant exposes the roots, but destroys the soil’s natural fabric. Information...

Laboratory with computer screens mounted on the wall, and a table with instruments

NIST Team Shows Tiny Frequency Combs Are Reliable Measurement Tools

April 25, 2018

In an advance that could shrink many measurement technologies, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners have...

Desktop Cosmology: A Model of the Expanding Universe

April 23, 2018

When the universe was very young – about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang – it underwent a sudden explosive expansion...

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