NIST funds new high-precision, quantum measurement lab

Paul K. Guinnessy

Nathan R. Newbury, Esther Baumann, Ian R. Coddington +2 more

Carl J. Williams

Barbara L. Goldstein

ABSTRACT Co-Hosted with iNEMI Fueled by the convergence of Industry 4.0, the second quantum revolution, and advances in integrated photonics and nanomanufacturing, NIST has embarked on a sweeping program to revolutionize metrology. Building on the success of the chip-scale atomic clock, which shrunk a lab of sophisticated equipment run by Ph.D. physicists down to a commercial device the size of a grain of rice, NIST is miniaturizing its core measurement technologies into a suite of quantum-based standards that never need to be taken off-line for calibration. This talk will provide an overview of this program, known as NIST on a Chip, and some of the opportunities it is enabling. https://www.nist.gov/noac About the Presenter: Ms. Barbara Goldstein serves as Associate Director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory, the largest operational unit at NIST consisting of approximately 1300 staff and associates and three joint institutes, and which is responsible for realizing and disseminating rigorous measurements to support commercial, defense and research enterprises. Ms. Goldstein manages the &NIST on a Chip” program which is establishing a new paradigm for precision measurement dissemination through a suite of deployable, fit-for-purpose, quantum-based standards to be embedded in products or installed at user sites. Ms. Goldstein is contributing to the emerging quantum economy through international standardization activities. She leads a standardization outlook and maturity assessment subgroup of the UN-based ITU-T Focus Group on Quantum Information Technology for Networks, and developed a standards landscape through the Quantum Economic Development Consortium. She led the development of e-commerce standards that have been used in hundreds of thousands of business transactions; led roadmap efforts on the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) and factory automation; and developed and led the NIST Technologies for the Integration of Manufacturing Applications program which competitively awarded a cost shared research portfolio of approximately $150M. Prior to joining NIST in 1992, she implemented information management systems at McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), and managed computing facilities at the Israeli Land Authority in Jerusalem. Files Available: Slides and Link to Recorded Presentation (PDF) On Demand Webinar

R. Harris, J. Niemeyer

Matthew Aldous, Rushton, Jo, Himsworth, Matt

The confinement and control of atomic clouds, at temperatures measured in nanokelvin, has become a valuable tool for physicists. As a source of new physics, development of cooling techniques has led to innovative new ways to probe the nature of reality. Of particular note are experiments carried out on new and exotic states of matter such as the Bose-Einstein condensate, unseen before the advent of these techniques. Likewise, the potential for applications outside of the lab is extensive and encompasses navigation, timekeeping, quantum communication and quantum computing. Manipulating cold atoms in the presence of a so-called ‘atom chip’ (a millimetre-scale electronic device) is currently considered the future of miniaturising these experiments and measurements, but since they still require precisely locked and stabilised lasers and predominantly must take place in the ultra-high vacuum regime, quantum control relies on an extensive and well-established infrastructure of optics, electronics, vacuum chambers and pumps. This encumbrance has slowed down the transition from chip-in-a-lab experiments to lab-on-a-chip technologies. This thesis is an account of work carried out in the development of enabling technologies which will accelerate this transition, including details of prototype devices made using established semiconductor and MEMS planar fabrication techniques. The construction and testing of an apparatus for anodically and eutectically bonding die-scale samples in ultra-high vacuum is described, along with an analysis and characterisation of some of its products.