nist.gov

2 weeks ago | nist.gov | Rebecca Jacobson

Randomness is incredibly useful. People often draw straws, throw dice or flip coins to make fair choices. Random numbers can enable auditors to make completely unbiased selections. Randomness is also key in security; if a password or code is an unguessable string of numbers, it’s harder to crack. Many of our cryptographic systems today use random number generators to produce secure keys. But how do you know that a random number is truly random?

2 weeks ago | nist.gov | Angela Walker |Kevin Garrity |Rebecca L. Dally

Complex chalcogenides in the MPS3 family of materials (M = Mn, Fe, Co, and Ni) display remarkably different phase progressions depending upon the metal center orbital filling, character of the P–P linkage, and size of the van der Waals gap. There is also a stacking pattern and spin state difference between the "lighter" and "heavier" transition metal-containing systems that places CoPS3 at the nexus of these activities - even though this compound is under-explored from a properties point of view.

3 weeks ago | nist.gov | Keith Martin

Even if you’ve never learned the first-aid technique CPR, you’ve probably seen it on a TV show or movie and would recognize it happening: A person in medical distress lies on their back while a responder kneels over them, rhythmically pressing their hands into the patient’s chest to keep the heart pumping. Somewhat surprisingly to me, two electrical engineers, one of whom worked here at NIST, helped create the technique we know today as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

1 month ago | nist.gov | Zachary Levine

Rubidium vapor cells play a key role in contemporary quantum optics since they have strong nonlinear interactions with low-power incident laser light. The simplest nonlinear interaction is the Kerr effect. Although most calculations concentrate on the unsaturated Kerr effect, the saturated Kerr effect has been measured in many material including 85Rb and 87Rb vapor.

1 month ago | nist.gov | Daniel Eliot