An official website of the United States government
Here’s how you know
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (
) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
Perched atop a high plateau in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a long-awaited observatory is beginning to take shape: the largest suite of ground-based telescopes
Thermometers can do a lot of things: measure the temperature at the center of your perfectly braised chicken or tell you whether to keep your child home from
Blog Posts
How Low Can Temperature Go? Lord Kelvin and the Science of Absolute Zero
Approach 1 Compact Blackbody Radiation Atomic Sensor (CoBRAS) The Compact Blackbody Radiation Atomic Sensor (CoBRAS) uses a thermal vapor of atoms excited by a single laser to detect BBR. From the optically excited state, atomic population is transferred to other, nearby excited states by a
Almost all the devices developed by the Quantum Sensors Group work at temperatures below liquid helium. Sometimes, it is necessary to develop specialized cryogenics to test the devices, or to facilitate their dissemination to outside users. The cryogenics team also aims to make refrigerators more
Accurate temperature measurements are essential to many industrial processes, including petrochemical or pharmaceutical production and nuclear power generation. Typical process control thermometers, such as resistance temperature detectors, are known to drift over time and degrade when subject to
A fixed point is a reproducible reference temperature, usually either melting of freezing of a pure substance, that allows a standardized interpolation scheme for the purposes of temperature scale dissemination. Most SPRTs are long-stem designs that require immersion-type fixed points incorporating
David La Mantia, Mingxin Lei, Nikunjkumar Prajapati, Noah Schlossberger, Matthew Simons, Christopher Holloway, Julia Scherschligt, Stephen Eckel, Eric Norrgard
We demonstrate a blackbody radiation thermometer based on optically excited rubidium atoms in a vapor cell. Operating as a calibrated contact thermometer from
A specific sub-set of comparison data is presented for two NIST water-triple-point cells that provide traceability to the results of the 2023 Consultative
A refractive-index gas thermometer has been used to determine T − T90 in the temperature range (293 T 433) K within about 3 µK/K relative standard uncertainty
Description The Seebeck coefficient is a widely measured transport property that provides fundamental information on charge carrier transport and the electronic