Mission
Current Directions
Technical Highlights
Future Directions

Mission

The FCDC mission is to:

• provide an international information center on the fundamental constants;
  
• provide periodically sets of recommended values of the constants for international use;
  
• administer the NIST Precision Measurement Grant (PMG) Program;
  
• provide the editorship of the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and
  
• serve as the NIST-authorized organization for the interpretation of the International System of Units (SI) in the United States.

• Information Center and Constants Adjustments. Maintain a fundamental constants library, a Web bibliographic database, respond to inquiries, and carry out the next Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) least-squares adjustment of the values of the constants.

• Precision Measurement Grants. Continue to fund proposals of the highest quality and that provide maximum benefit to NIST.

• NIST Journal of Research. Continue to ensure that the NIST Journal of Research is a highly respected scientific publication.

• SI Units. Generate and disseminate publications related to the SI.

• Measurement Uncertainty. Under the auspices of the international Joint Committee for Guides on Metrology (JCGM), generate guides on expressing measurement uncertainty.

• Definitive Article on the Values of the Constants. The 140-page definitive article that gives the new CODATA recommended values of the fundamental constants and describes in detail both the data and analysis techniques used to obtain them was published in two well-known scientific journals: the Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data and the Reviews of Modern Physics. The article is entitled "CODATA Recommended Values of the Fundamental Physical Constants: 1998" and was authored by Physics Laboratory researchers Peter J. Mohr and Barry N. Taylor under the auspices of the CODATA Task Group on Fundamental Constants. The paper took nearly 5 years to complete, reviews all of the data relevant to the constants that were available by 31 December 1998, required Mohr and Taylor to exchange well over 1000 email messages with researchers around the world in order to properly treat their experimental and theoretical results, and required a radical change in computerization compared with what had been done previously. (The last set of CODATA recommended values was issued in 1986.)

  Although it is highly unusual for such a lengthy article to be published in two different journals, in this case the editors of the journals decided that because of the importance of the fundamental constants to all of science and technology, the article should be published in both in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. Further, the decision by CODATA to issue a new set of values of the constants more frequently than in the past gives added importance to the paper: Mohr and Taylor wrote it with this new approach in mind, attempting to both structure it and include sufficient detail to allow future compilations of the values of the constants to be understood with only a discussion of new work.

• New Precision Measurement Grants. Two new $50,000 NIST Precision Measurement Grants were awarded for fiscal year 2001. The recipients, Prof. D.P. DeMille of Yale University and Prof. M.V. Romalis of the University of Washington, were selected from an initial group of 27 candidates. NIST sponsors these grants to promote fundamental research in measurement science in U.S. colleges and universities and to foster contacts between NIST scientists and researchers in the academic community actively engaged in such work.

  The aim of DeMille's project, "Search for the Electron Electric Dipole Moment in the a(1) State of PbO," is to use the paramagnetic metastable excited state a(1) of PbO to search for an electron electric dipole moment (EDM) with a detection limit of 10^-31 e-cm, 10^-4 times the current detection limit of 10^-27 e-cm. This 10⁴ improvement will allow DeMille to provide stringent tests of the Standard Model of particle physics (SM), which does not allow a finite EDM, and extensions of the SM such as super symmetry (SUSY), which in fact predict an EDM in the range of DeMille's proposed detection limit. Thus, this project should shed some experimental light on physics beyond the Standard Model -- a topic that is currently of the highest priority in the physics community.

  The aim of Romalis' project, "A Test of CPT Symmetry Using a New K-³He Self-Compensating Magnetometer," is to perform a high precision test of combined charge conjugation, parity inversion, and time reversal (CPT) invariance and local Lorentz invariance by comparing the Larmor precession frequencies of potassium (K) and helium 3 (³He) atoms in the same cell as a function of time, i.e., the daily rotation of the Earth about its axis and the movement of the Earth relative to the cosmic microwave background radiation. The experiment will improve the existing tests of these important fundamental symmetries of nature by a factor of 1000 and should provide tests of various theories of quantum gravity, such as string theory, which predict violations of CPT and Lorentz invariance. These theories attempt to treat gravity in the framework of quantum mechanics -- a recognized necessity if our picture of the physical world is ever to be complete and internally consistent.

A principal focus of the FCDC's work in calendar year 2001 will be expanding the FCDC's Web-accessible bibliographic data base of the fundamental constants, and preparing various publications that describe the 1998 CODATA constants adjustment and/or give the new recommended values. These include an article for Physics Today, a wallet card, and a wall chart. Another principal focus will be the preparation of a special issue of the NIST Journal of Research in honor of the NIST Centennial in 2001. Revisions of NIST publications SP 330 and SP 811 on the SI are also planned.