PML Impact: December 2021/January 2022

The latest news from the Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) at NIST.

View As Web Page December 2021 – January 2022 Sizing Up Sneezes, Rain Clouds, and Ink Jets By improving calibration of optical microscopes, a NIST team for the first time measured the volume of individual fluid droplets smaller than 100 trillionths of a liter with an uncertainty of less than 1% -- a tenfold improvement over previous results. Doing so is important for studying how airborne viruses spread, how clouds cool the Earth, how ink jet printers perform, and how plastic soda bottles turn into nanoscale particles that pollute the oceans. Read More FEATURE STORIES 'Smart' Quantum Receiver Messages transmitted as pulses of light over long fiber-optic lines typically grow very faint by the time they reach the receiver, increasing the probability of errors. A new system provides immediate estimates of confidence for each piece of the message, making error correction easier and more efficient. Read More New Way to Trace Disease Spread NIST researchers have designed and tested low-cost devices and methods – combining Bluetooth radio hardware with NIST cryptographic features -- that can detect when people or animals come into close contact with each other. Read More Light Standards Improved NIST has completed major upgrades to two key instruments serving critical national needs: measuring the properties of light as it is reflected from a surface or transmitted through a material. Read More When Atoms Bunch Up Scientists at NIST and the JQI have prepared and controlled a peculiar arrangement of atoms – many-body localization – that might eventually serve as a form of memory in quantum computing. Read More Connect with us Received this email from a friend? Subscribe here. Privacy Policy Subscriber services: Manage Preferences  |  Unsubscribe  |  Help

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