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Physics

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

green laser

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.
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Johnny Jiménez

NIST Offers New Calibration Service for Wavemeters

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A high-tech laboratory with large black equipment featuring two circular insets showing detailed machinery setups. A computer workstation is in the foreground.

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

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pump laser illustration

With Some Bumps, NIST Scientists Devise a Novel Way to Extend the Wavelength Range of Microcombs

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View optical physics and communications events

Blog Posts

Isabelle Rivera poses smiling at a computer with two monitors, one showing a spreadsheet and the other multiple file icons.

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

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NIST researchers Yoshi Ohno and Jane Li demonstrate different types of lighting in their lab on NIST’s campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

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

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Woman with long dark hair wearing safety goggle stands in front of a table that has a series of lenses on stands

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

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View optical physics and communications publications

Projects and Programs

Spectroscopic ellipsometry measurement of a 2D monolayer and the optical property for such a thin layer.

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
Planar absolute cryogenic radiometer with multiwall vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes. Superconducting transition-edge sensor. Fully-lithographic fabrication.

Photonic Radiometry

Ongoing
Meeting the needs of the photonics industry and anticipating emerging technologies requires investigation and development of improved measurement methods and instrumentation. This project develops state-of-art, absolute microfabricated thermal detectors with absorber coatings consisting of carbon

Waveform Metrology Project

Ongoing
Optical measurement techniques: NIST uses the electro-optic sampling (EOS) technique to measure the vector response of photodiodes and provide phase traceability for commercial instrumentation, such as large-signal network analyzers, lightwave component analyzers, vector signal analyzers
Figure 1. Class of optical setup considered in this work. The aperture can be limiting (as shown in this case) or nonlimiting.

Diffraction effects in radiometry

Ongoing
Essentially, classical radiometry relies on geometrical optics (to relate source radiance), geometrical aspects of an optical layout, and the irradiance at the detector. One considers the propagation of radiation from points on the surface of the source to points on the surface of the detector. In

Software

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

HolograFREE

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

Tools and Instruments

THz photomixer spectrometer

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