A European collaboration involving clock experts from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM) has used one of the world’s transportable optical atomic clocks to measure gravitation for the first time. The results of the experiment were published in Nature Physics. Until now, such delicate…
Measuring Thermal Expansion At Low Temperatures For Future Space Missions
Space holds numerous fascinating objects which we can only investigate by observing their radiation – even beyond the visible range. For space telescopes such as the European Space Agency’s (ESA) infrared observatory Herschel, whose mission is to observe radiation in the far-infrared, cooling the instruments is of vital importance, since the instruments themselves must not…
Precise Thickness Measurement of Soft Materials
In microsystems, metallic components are increasingly replaced by components made of inexpensive polymers. As polymers yield when they are subjected to pressure, the layer thicknesses cannot be measured with sufficient accuracy by means of conventional contact stylus instruments. But precision is of decisive importance in microsystem technology. Here, the scientists of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB)…