Abstract:At the National Institute of Standards and Technology, our ultimate objective is to create what we call intrinsic standards.As part of the Electronics and Electrical Engineering Laboratory the Quantum...At the National Institute of Standards and Technology, our ultimate objective is to create what we call intrinsic standards.As part of the Electronics and Electrical Engineering Laboratory the Quantum Electrical Metrology Division concentrates primarily on intrinsic electrical standards.Such standards can be widely used by any careful operators to give results that are ultimately as accurate as those produced within NIST by our expert metrologists.An intrinsic standard that is based on quantum effects is particularly attractive.Such effects offer tiny rulers permitting counting the number of quanta that make up a quantity to be measured.The quantum effects we use are the counting rate of fl ow of superconducting fl ux quanta or the much larger resistance quanta in the quantum Hall effect.We are also developing techniques for counting individual electrons.All of these effects occur at very low temperatures close to absolute zero.Other organizations at NIST use atomic transitions to measure time and frequency of the wavelength of light from a certain laser to measure length.Read More