The AML’s Nanofabrication Facility, for example, will enable development, prototyping, and evaluation of dimensional references, specialized test structures, and nanotechnology tools and devices basic to efficient processing of real-world products containing essential nanotechnology components. To be operated as a user facility, it will provide NIST’s collaborators with access to expensive nanofabrication tools and specialized expertise in a shared-cost environment.

Freed from disruptive environmental influences, NIST scientists and engineers aim to develop tools and methods that will permit now extraordinary laboratory accomplishments to progress to the level of practical applications. For example, in ongoing and planned projects, researchers will:

* Demonstrate capabilities for preprogrammed, automated assembly of thousands of atoms into complex working structures, revealing the physical principles and key variables that define “bottom-up” nanomanufacturing processes.
* Greatly increase the range and accuracy of NIST's high-precision, laser-based capabilities for calibrating light detectors, delivering an improvement in “visual perception” vital to industries ranging from electronic displays to automobiles and research applications ranging from environmental sensing to astronomy.
* Develop and demonstrate the technologies and underpinning measurement methods required to position, manipulate, assemble, manufacture, and integrate across scales ranging from nanometers to millimeters—or from the nanoscopic to the macroscopic. Examples include positioners, sensors, and actuators, as well as design tools, modeling methods, data exchange formats, image analysis techniques, and control system architectures.
* Develop a self-calibrating standard for capacitance—a measure of the ability to store an electrical charge—by counting and directing about 100 million electrons onto a plate of a cryogenic capacitor and then determining the voltage that develops. The result will be a commercial standard useful to many industries, including defense, and to basic research.
* Measure and manipulate single molecules. Results of traditional chemical and biochemical experiments are an average of the behavior of millions or billions of molecules en masse. But in cells, proteins and other biomolecules often act one at a time. NIST’s single-molecule measurement and manipulation program is developing ultrasensitive techniques for directly probing and measuring individual molecules and controlling them in a single “lab on a chip.”