Award Data

Proposed here is the continued development of an innovative rheometer configuration design at NIST. It describes the determination of suitable detection, drive, control, software and assembly designs for a commercially viable, fully integrated device. The initial efforts will concentrate on examining the sub-systems of the design. An important feature of the proposed strategy is early commercial i ...

Aerosol delivery of pharmaceuticals is an effective means of treating numerous diseases. Proper administration of drugs in this form requires knowledge of the droplet size and concentration of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) within the aerosol. Optical imaging is a robust method for obtaining this information. Physical Sciences Incorporated proposes to develop, build, and test a novel m ...

Carbon nanotubes are one of the most studied and potentially useful nanoparticles known. However, presently even the purest are only commercially available in mixtures of chiralities and lengths. Even though numerous lab scale methods to separate them have been demonstrated, few offer the potential to be scaled and offered as a product. Eikos has found that, for many applications, nanotube length ...

Quantifying oceanic CO2 uptake and ocean acidification and understanding their impact on global climate and ocean ecology are key goals of NOAA’s climate change research programs. NOAA’s request for Development of a long-term Lagrangian pH and pCO2 drifter (SBIR Subtopic 8.3.1C) aims to address these goals by developing technology that measures both pCO2 and pH that can be widely deployed in t ...

This topic requires the capability for enabling high sensitivity/high precision measurements of calcium concentrates in seawater. This proposal aims to demonstrate the feasibility of a novel high sensitive nanosensor that can be used to determine very low concentrations of calcium in seawater in the presence of a large background calcium concentration. The sensor approach uses the benefits of nano ...

In the proposed effort, we will leverage this extensive experience and capabilities to realize a frequency agile mmW radiometer that can cover the range of DC-110 GHz and can be scaled to DC-200 GHz under Phase II. Ours is a photonic system that multiplies and up-coverts a low-frequency reference signal onto an optical carrier (laser) using EO modulation, then uses the modulation sidebands to inj ...

An existing low-cost FPGA-based processing platform will be demonstrated with fiber-coupling to single-photon detectors, to perform photon-arrival time stamping with

Voxtel has demonstrated efficient high-speed photon counting with thresholded linear-mode avalanche photodiode (APD) receivers using multi-gain-stage InGaAs/InAIAs APDs. In contrast to Geiger APDs, thresholded photon-counting linear APD receivers are thought not to suffer afterpulsing, and can support maximum count rates (MCR) up to 2 or 3 orders of magnitude faster than Geiger APDs. However, the ...

This SBIR Phase I effort will establish the feasibility of fabricating advanced waveguide structures in potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP) capable of efficiently generating 25 to 40 mW of frequency converted light in the 395 to 480 nm. The key innovation in this effort is to utilize KTP waveguides in a single-pass frequency doubling device to efficiently produce the desired laser wavelengths and po ...

A stable, well characterized InGaAs materials growth and photodetector fabrication process will be used to fabricate matched photodiodes optimized for balanced homodyne detection. The 1-mm-diameter p-i-n photodetectors will be manufactured back-illuminated with a 5-micron absorber, allowing residual light to reflect off the front-side metal to make a double pass through the active layer. Ultra-hig ...