Optical Technology Portal

The NIST Thermodynamic Metrology Group maintains and develops national standards of temperature (in the range 0.65 K to 1235 K), and supports … more

LUnar Spectral Irradiance and radiance (LUSI) is a proposed suite of instruments to radiometrically characterize the Moon for use as an on-orbit … more

Optical frequency conversion, in which the color of light is changed, is a process that has numerous applications in physics and technology. For … more

In support of defense programs in remote sensing, NIST maintains the scale for infrared radiant flux by using the Absolute Cryogenic radiometer … more

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) requires all test facilities to have their blackbodies calibrated at the NIST Low background infrared (LBIR) … more

We have developed several portable radiometers to transfer the primary detector-based scales for optical power, radiance, and irradiance in the … more

POWR is a cryogenic electrical substitution radiometer that serves as the Nation's optical power reference. more

Design of the lunar irradiance instrument is based on commercially available spectrographs. These spectrographs can be stable and sub-components … more

An integrating-sphere system has been designed and constructed for the measurement of multiple optical properties in the infrared spectral range. … more

The Synchrotron Ultraviolet Radiation Facility SURF III is operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST as a stable light … more

Goniometric optical scatter instrument (GOSI) The bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) quantifies the angular distribution of … more

Solid-state lighting (SSL) is increasingly being introduced into the market and it is expected that many of the light sources currently used for … more

SCATMECH is an object-oriented C++ class library developed to distribute models for light scattering applications. Included in the library are … more

The MIST program has been developed to provide users with a general application to model an integrated scattering system. The program performs an … more

A graphical user interface program, JB95 , based on a Windows 95 © API platform has been written in the C programming language to aid in the … more