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Domain: npl.co.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to npl.co.uk.
Stories · 6
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New Nanodevice Creates a Near Perfect Electron Stream
SchrodingerZ writes "Scientists from the National Physics Laboratory of the United Kingdom have teamed up with the University of Cambridge to create a new electron pump that creates a single electron stream. "The device drives electrical current by manipulating individual electrons, one-by-one at very high speed." The pump takes single electrons, and pushes it over a barrier with an indent for the electron to fall into, and is then sent to the opposite side of the barrier with astounding precision. "By employing this technique, the team were able to pump almost a billion electrons per second, 300 times faster than the previous record for an accurate electron pump set at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the USA in 1996." Although the current was very small (150 picoamperes), this event could cause a shift from the ampere measure of current to a smaller, more precise unit of measurement for electrical current." -
New Nanodevice Creates a Near Perfect Electron Stream
SchrodingerZ writes "Scientists from the National Physics Laboratory of the United Kingdom have teamed up with the University of Cambridge to create a new electron pump that creates a single electron stream. "The device drives electrical current by manipulating individual electrons, one-by-one at very high speed." The pump takes single electrons, and pushes it over a barrier with an indent for the electron to fall into, and is then sent to the opposite side of the barrier with astounding precision. "By employing this technique, the team were able to pump almost a billion electrons per second, 300 times faster than the previous record for an accurate electron pump set at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the USA in 1996." Although the current was very small (150 picoamperes), this event could cause a shift from the ampere measure of current to a smaller, more precise unit of measurement for electrical current." -
Graphene and Quantum Hall Effect Could Help Redefine Metrics
eldavojohn writes "The National Physical Laboratory has published research in Nature that could lead to redefining two of our most commonly used metrics. There's been a lot of trouble stemming from defining an exact Kilogram as some lump of platinum-iridium sitting in a glass case somewhere, so the proposal was put forth to study the quantum hall effect with different materials. Enter the Nobel prize winning, super strong, silicon usurping graphene. NPL now says you can add quantum resistance metrology to the list of graphene's many conquests as they say the quantum hall effect in graphene is 'very robust and easy to measure.' With this at their disposal, the Kilogram may be redefined in terms of h, the Planck constant, and the Ampere may be redefined in terms of e, the electron charge (alias Elementary charge or the charge of a proton). You can find the full paper here." -
Celebrating The Origins of Packet Switching
XaN-ASMoDi writes with an interesting historical piece at the BBC on the early history of packet switching, excerpting: "It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century. And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate, but the only reason that [...] the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL). On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called 'packet switching.'" -
New Atomic Clock 1000 Times More Accurate
stevelinton writes "The UK National Physical Laboratory has a new atomic clock potentially 1000 times more accurate than current cesium clocks: to within 1 second in about 30 billion years! This could lead quite soon to a new definition of the second, and in a while to improved resolution in GPS successor systems. More interestingly, there are theories that some of the universe's fundamental dimensionless constants may have changed by a parts in a million over the last 10 billion years or so. These clocks are so accurate that they should be able to detect these changes over a year or two." -
Exactly One Kilogram Of Silicon
Ed Pegg Jr writes "You may know of the importance of 299792458 for length, and 9192631770 for time. However, the official standard for weight is still a block of platinum/iridium made a hundred years ago. A group of scientists from the Avogadro Project are hoping to change that, though, by producing a perfect sphere of ultrapure silicon."