GAITHERSBURG, Md. -- The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) opened the doors of its Gaithersburg campus on June 20 to share its work in nanotechnology with more than 200 researchers from industry, academia and government.

The Open House was one of four organized in the past year by the Greater Washington Nanotech Group, with the previous events taking place at the University of Maryland, the Naval Research Laboratory and the National Science Foundation.

For its part, NIST holds an interest in nanotechnology because its mission is to develop and promote measurements, standards and technology to enhance productivity, facilitate trade and improve the quality of life. All of which plays into the emergence of nanotechnology. NIST is a non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Commerce Department's Technology Administration, and it was founded in 1901 as the National Bureau of Standards. There are roughly 3,000 scientists, engineers, technicians and support and administrative personnel working for NIST, and about 1,600 guest researchers. NIST also partners with 2,000 manufacturing specialists and staff at affiliated centers around the country.

As one of the several agencies involve in the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), NIST will be called on to provide the new measurements, standards and data that will make useful technologies out of nanotechnology. NIST measurement and standards research and development in support of the NNI will include development of new atomic scale measurements for length, mass, chemical composition and new nanoscale manufacturing technologies.

The morning portion of the NIST Open House was reserved for 15-minute presentations by NIST researchers from the agency's Boulder, Colo. and Gaithersburg facilities. The morning also included a talk by Benjamin Wu, Deputy Under Secretary for Technology at the U.S. Department of Commerce on the promise of nanotechnology for the economy. As a veteran of the Technology Subcommittee of the House Science Committee, on which he served while a senior congressional staffer, Wu praised the NNI, but also put U.S. investment in nanotechnology into perspective.

According to Wu, one-quarter of worldwide nanotechnology investment comes from the United States, while one-fifth comes from Europe. But the Asia-Pacific region is also off to a good start. Japan accounts for one-third of nanotech investment, and Taiwan is taking steps toward laying a foundation in the area by introducing nanoscience to students in what the U.S. considers middle school.

Among the presentations focused on nanoelectronics was the first technical presentation of the day, given by Dr. William D. Phillips, who spoke about his work in quantum information research. Phillips, who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light, detailed his group's work being done toward developing a quantum computer, which could be used to factor giant numbers, and therefore holds promise in cryptography. No one has ever developed a quantum computer, but the theory, which includes quantum bits (called qubits) being both a "0" and "1" at the same time rather than a "0" or "1" as in conventional computing, is solid.

A poster session describing the work of Dr. William Egelhoff's work with NIST's Magnetic Materials Group on ultrahigh density data storage also demonstrated how NIST researchers were working alongside industry and other government researchers to put nanotechnology to work in electronics. Egelhoff, conventional hard drive in hand, told interested observers that few changes have come to commercial drives since the advent of giant magnetoresistance, and that only seven companies worldwide still manufacture drives.