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Optical physics and communications

What a Frequency Comb Can Do

What a Comb Can Do
What a Comb Can Do
By making a simple measurement, the optical frequency comb has changed science. So what can a comb do? A lot—and the possibilities are constantly expanding. Learn more: https://www.nist.gov/topics/physics/optical-frequency-combs

News and Updates

Tiny New Lasers Fill a Long-Standing Gap in the Rainbow of Visible-Light Colors, Opening New Applications

Researchers have created orange, yellow and green lasers tiny enough to fit on a chip.

NIST Researchers Publish Comprehensive Survey on Entanglement Routing in Quantum Networks

NIST Offers New Calibration Service for Wavemeters

From Pandemics to Pedicures: NIST Rebuilds World-Class UV Calibration System

Blog Posts

Reaching for the Stars: My Summer Internship Learning About Spectroscopy in Space and on Earth

The Eye of the Beholder: How Lighting Affects Our Color Perception

What’s a Physicist? My Summer as a Student Intern at NIST

Projects and Programs

Optical and Optoelectronic Materials Characterization

Ongoing
Today's electronics have reached a point where sheer computation power has combined form and function as the key driver of large consumer markets. The demand for portable and pervasive electronics with greater functionality promises significant changes over the next decades in how society interacts

Measuring Light-Matter Interactions in Chip-Based Optical Cavities

Ongoing
A "single emitter" is a structure that exhibits a transition from a high energy state to a low energy state, thereby generating a photon, or light emission. A variety of solid-state single emitters have been discovered or manufactured. One example is a quantum dot, a nanometer-scale structure that

Bilateral Comparison of Spectral Responsivity in the Vacuum-Ultraviolet

Completed
The last decade has seen numerous key comparisons in the field of photometry and radiometry between different national metrology institutes (NMIs) in the context of the Mutual Recognition Arrangement. At first, these comparisons were restricted to wavelengths longer than 200 nm, with just the

Optical scattering from surfaces

Ongoing
Light Scattering Ellipsometry: The polarization of scattered light can often indicate the source of that scattered light. Using Light Scattering Ellipsometry, whereby the polarization of light scattered into directions out of the plane of incidence is measured for a fixed incident polarization

Software

HolograFREE

An electron hologram is a fringe modulated image containing the amplitude and phase information of an electron transparent object. The HolograFREE routines

Modeled integrated scatter tool (MIST)

The MIST program has been developed to provide users with a general application to model an integrated scattering system. The program performs an integration of

Tools and Instruments

Continuous-wave terahertz spectrometer

The continuous-wave terahertz spectrometer makes use of two near-infrared lasers. The first laser is a fixed-frequency cw ring Ti:Saph laser operating near 840

Awards