Precision Measurement Grants

• Current Awards - 2007

  Dallin S. Durfee
  Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

  Testing Coulomb's Law with Cold-Ion Matterwave Interferometry
  
  We propose to search for deviations from Coulomb's inverse-square law using a slow-ion interferometer. Such a deviation is proposed in models of electromagnetism which suppose a non-zero photon rest mass. Limits on possible deviations have interesting and profound implications and will lead to a better understanding of physical theories which go beyond the Standard Model. This measurement will be many orders of magnitude more sensitive that prior Earth-bound experiments, and will revitalize an important field which has not seen significant progress over the last three decades. The work will also lead to extremely sensitive magnetic- and electric-field sensors for fundamental studies and practical applications and will push forward the field of charged-particle matterwave interferometry.

  K. Pachucki
  University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

  High Precision Calculations of Transition Frequencies In Three-Electron Atoms Versus Nuclear Structure
  
  We propose to calculate transition energies, isotope shifts, and hyper-fine splittings, including higher order relativistic corrections, in three-electron atoms, with sufficient precision to probe nuclear structure, such as the charge distribution, scalar electric and vector polarizabilities, and to resolve significant discrepancies between measured and theoretical values for excited states of the lithium atom.

• 36 years of Precision Measurement Grant

  NIST has awarded Precision Measurement Grants over the past 36 years to promote fundamental research in measurement science in U.S. colleges and universities. The grants are awarded for three years, with an initial year funding of $50,000. The funding may be renewed at $50,000 per year for up to two additional years, for a total of $150,000, at the discretion of NIST.

• Four Grantees win Nobel Prize in Physics

  The 2005 award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Theodor W. Hänsch of the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik Garching and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, along with John L. Hall of NIST at Boulder, JILA, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Roy J. Glauber of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, brings to four the number of NIST Precision Measurement Grant awardees who have gone on to win the Nobel Prize. Hänsch was awarded a Precision Measurement Grant in 1974 for work on precision laser spectroscopy of one-electron atoms. The other Grant recipients who subsequently won the Nobel prize are Carl E. Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder and JILA, Steven Chu of the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University.
• Summary of NIST Precision Measurement Grants
  [44 kB PDF (Get the Acrobat Viewer)]


• How to apply for a 2008 Grant   (48 kB PDF)