For the second time in a row, NPL is the winner in the Research & Development Sector award in the RoSPA Occupational Health and Safety Awards 2013. This is the premier award for the Research and Development Sector and recognises NPL's excellence in Health and Safety performance. This follows on from the 'Highly Commended' Sector Award that NPL won in 2011 and 2010.

Dating back 57 years, the RoSPA Awards scheme recognises commitment to accident and ill health prevention and is open to businesses and organisations of all types and sizes from across the UK and overseas. Awards are presented in more than 20 sectors, and competitive awards also recognise excellence in specialist areas, such as the Research & Development Sector award.

These awards prove a consistent commitment, and improvement, to good Health and Safety management over a prolonged period. They are also in recognition of all members of staff who have worked so hard over the years to improve Health and Safety at NPL.

For further information, please contact Chris Williams

Read about NPL's Health, Safety and Environment policies

See NPL's other awards

Find out more about RoSPA

The Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is one of the UK's seven publicly funded Research Councils responsible for supporting, co-ordinating and promoting research, innovation and skills development in seven distinct fields.

STFC was formed in April 2007 and has an annual budget of around £500 million, which is used to:

• fund the best research in astronomy and nuclear and particle physics;
• enable the research community to have access to the best facilities in the world;
• provide leadership and leverage in the development and implementation of strategies for large facilities;
• increase the UK technology capability, engagement with industry and knowledge transfer.

The STFC council is comprised of a combination of non-executive directors from academia and industry and is chaired by Professor Sir Michael Sterling. The council is committed to a more integrated approach to large facilities, including international negotiations; and to ensure that the STFC delivers its goals, upholds its responsibility towards its stakeholders, users, members of public and staff of the organisation.

Science & Technology Facilities Council

Contact: Brian Bowsher

There are four Galileo satellites already in orbit and the atomic clocks on board them are now providing time accurate to a few nanoseconds, or billionths of a second.

Marco Falcone, ESA's Galileo System Manager, gives this some context:

"A single lightning flash across the sky during a thunderstorm lasts about ten milliseconds, which is already 10,000,000 nanoseconds. But for high-tech applications, as well as navigation services, nanosecond accuracy is essential."

NPL has collaborated with five other European time-measurement institutions on a 'Time Validation Facility' for Galileo. This centre compares European clocks and national time scales to the time provided on board the satellites and estimates how far away this time signal is from Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), the international time scale. This is then provided to the Galileo Control Centre and uploaded to the satellites, enabling their signals to be expressed in terms of UTC.

UTC is part of all our daily lives: it is the timing used for the internet, banking and aviation standards as well as precise scientific experiments. The Bureau International de Poids et Mesures (BIPM) computes UTC based on inputs from collections of atomic clocks maintained by institutions around the world, including NPL.

Read the full press release from the European Space Agency (ESA)

Discover more about NPL's work on accurate time

62 delegates from a mix of organisations took part in the Young England and Wales Programme 2013 event in Lancaster at the beginning of May. Delegates came from range of organisations including: the Identity and Passport Service, Royal College of Physicians, Welsh Government and Ofsted. As well as Kathryn, NPL was represented by Jonathan Fletcher, Julia Doff and Ben Piper.

Kathryn won the England and Wales Young Thinker of the Year (Public Bodies) 2013 title and then the overall title England and Wales Young Thinker of the Year 2013 - for the delegate with the highest mark overall - beating the winners of the Local Authorities and Professional & Educational Awards.

The Young Programme exists to develop the communication skills of people in the early stages of their working lives or who are performing voluntary work in the community. It does so through an annual series of residential courses and competitions. The programme aims to encourage the research, writing and presentational abilities of delegates.

The centrepiece of each event is the presentation of a 900-word paper ('argument') on a topic - of the delegate's own choice - of current interest or controversy. Kathryn presented on 'Climate change'.

Contact: Kathryn Asplin

Find out more about NPL's Sustainability commercial services

Find out more about the Centre for Carbon Measurement

There is an urgent need to find new antibiotics as bacteria are constantly evolving and steadily becoming resistant to the current arsenal used by doctors around the world. A key question is whether it is possible to create better anti-infective agents by taking a cue from nature, using design principles that link the structure of antimicrobial peptides to their formidable function. Before this can happen, we need to better understand the molecular mechanism by which these peptides do their job.

A team led by NPL, featuring scientists from the London Centre for Nanotechnology, UCL, University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, Freie Universität Berlin and IBM, have now revealed for the first time a mechanism by which peptides rip bacterial membranes apart. Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the team used a combination of nanoscale imaging, computer simulation and de novo protein design to make the discovery.

NPL's Paulina Rakowska, a research scientist who worked on the project, said:

"It is believed that antimicrobial peptides can be used as new therapeutics, but for us it was important to understand exact reasons for their selectivity against microorganisms and the impact they have on bacterial membranes at the molecular level."

Antimicrobial pores in phospholipid bilayers imaged by nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry (left) and atomic force microscopy (right)

The results uncover a dynamic process whereby peptides form tiny pores, only a few nanometres across, which subsequently expand until they eventually reach the point of complete membrane disintegration. Direct observation of these processes adds to prevailing models regarding formation of small stable pores revealing a molecular mechanism of active pore expansion.

This offers a physical basis for bacterial membrane disruption which may be useful for drug developers when designing new medicines to combat infections.

Read the full paper: Nanoscale imaging reveals laterally expanding antimicrobial pores in lipid bilayers

More on NPL's work in Biotechnology

More on the National Centre of Excellence in Mass Specrometry Imaging (NiCE-MSI)

For more information, please contact Max Ryadnov

Electron pumps made from graphene work ten times faster
than similar pumps made from conventional three-dimensional
materials and can be used to generate larger currents
(image courtesy of Malcolm Connolly, NPL/Cambridge)

The international system of units (SI) comprises seven base units (the metre, kilogram, second, kelvin, ampere, mole and candela). Ideally, these should be stable over time and universally reproducible. This requires definitions based on fundamental constants of nature which are the same wherever you measure them.

The present definition of the ampere, however, is vulnerable to drift and instability. This is not sufficient to meet the accuracy needs of present and certainly future electrical measurement. The highest global measurement authority, the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, has proposed that the ampere be redefined in terms of the electron charge.

The front-runner in this race to redefine the ampere is the single-electron pump (SEP). SEPs create a flow of individual electrons by shuttling them in to a quantum dot - a particle holding pen - and emitting them one at a time and at a well-defined rate. The paper in Nature Nanotechnology describes how a graphene SEP has been successfully produced and characterised for the first time, and confirms its properties are extremely well suited to this application.

A good SEP pumps precisely one electron at a time to ensure accuracy, and pumps them quickly to generate a sufficiently large current. Up to now the development of a practical electron pump has been a two-horse race. Tuneable barrier pumps use traditional semiconductors and have the advantage of speed, while the hybrid turnstile utilises superconductivity and has the advantage that many can be put in parallel. Traditional metallic pumps, thought to be not worth pursuing, have been given a new lease of life by fabricating them out of the world's most famous super-material - graphene.

Previous metallic SEPs made of aluminium are very accurate, but pump electrons too slowly for making a practical current standard. Graphene's unique semi-metallic two-dimensional structure has just the right properties to let electrons on and off the quantum dot very quickly, creating a fast enough electron flow - at near gigahertz frequency - to create a current standard. The Achilles' heel of metallic pumps, slow pumping speed, has thus been overcome by exploiting the unique properties of graphene.

More work is required to optimise the material and make more accurate measurements, but the paper in Nature Nanotechnology marks a major step forward in the road towards using graphene to redefine the ampere.

The realisation of the ampere is currently derived indirectly from resistance or voltage, which can be realised separately using the quantum Hall effect and the Josephson Effect. A fundamental definition of the ampere would allow a direct realisation that National Measurement Institutes around the world could adopt. This would shorten the chain for calibrating current-measuring equipment, saving time and money for industries billing for electricity and using ionising radiation for cancer treatment.

Current, voltage and resistance are directly correlated. Because we measure resistance and voltage based on fundamental constants - electron charge and Planck's constant - being able to measure current would also allow us to confirm the universality of these constants on which many precise measurements rely.

Graphene is not the last word in creating an ampere standard. NPL and others are investigating various methods of defining current based on electron charge, but graphene SEPs could hold the answer. Also, any redefinition will have to wait until the kilogram has been redefined. This definition, due to be decided soon, will fix the value of electronic charge, on which any electron-based definition of the ampere will depend.

This innovation will also have important implications beyond measurement. Accurate SEPs operating at high frequency and accuracy can be used to make electrons collide and form entangled electron pairs. Entanglement is believed to be a fundamental resource for quantum computing, and for answering fundamental questions in quantum mechanics.

Malcolm Connolly, a research associate based in the Semiconductor Physics group at Cambridge, says:

"This paper describes how we have successfully produced the first graphene single-electron pump. We have work to do before we can use this research to redefine the ampere, but this is a major step towards that goal. We have shown that graphene outperforms other materials used to make this style of SEP. It is robust, easier to produce, and operates at higher frequency. Graphene is constantly revealing exciting new applications and as our understanding of the material advances rapidly, we seem able to do more and more with it."

This work was funded by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council / NPL Joint Postdoctoral Partnership.

Read the full paper in Nature Nanotechnology: Gigahertz quantized charge pumping in graphene quantum dots

More on NPL's work on Quantum Detection

University of Cambridge, Semiconductor Physics Group

For further details, please contact Malcolm Connolly

The Arden Photonics BQM-50 is based
on an NPL prototype

There are already commercial measuring devices available, but these can be slow, cumbersome and difficult to set up. The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) developed a prototype to shrink these devices to a more manageable size by using commercially produced liquid lens technology, which eliminates the need to physically move a lens when focusing the laser beam onto a detector. This prototype device has now been taken into production by UK-based Arden Photonics as the 'BQM-50 Beam Propagation Analyser Compact'.

The detector used in the device is a low profile, high pixel-density charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor. The liquid lens is placed as close as possible to the detection array, further minimising the device footprint, and is combined with a traditional lens to optimise the optical power of the system.

During testing it was shown that the commercial liquid lens behaves in a reproducible manner with both an increase and decrease in voltage signal. NPL also calibrated the liquid lens using a series of fixed lenses to check its performance.

Arden Photonics is a UK company that develops, manufactures and sells products for the photonics industry and provides consultancy in the areas of optical fibre technology and optical measurements. The company launched the device at the LASER World of PHOTONICS event in Munich, Germany, on 13-15 May 2013. The product comes packaged with simple to use software that gives complete control over the measurement via a USB 2.0 interface for connection to a laptop or desktop computer.

This partnership came about through NPL Technology Applied - a co-branding scheme for instrumentation and software technology developed by NPL and incorporated into commercial products.

David Robinson, founder and managing director of Arden Photonics, said:

"The partnership with NPL has been a great success for Arden Photonics. It has given us access to patented technology which we believe will allow many more laser users to obtain the information they need to optimise their system's performance."

The initial prototype of the device was developed at NPL by Simon Hall, who said:

"A small footprint device, that has the advantage of an array detection system, can be used to greatly improve the general measurement and characterisation of laser systems without sacrificing accuracy."

The finished product is one of the most compact and capable devices available and opens up new possibilities for laser control.

Many companies benefit from NPL technology inside their own products, processes and services. Find out more about NPL Technology Applied

For further information about the device and details on how to order it, please visit Arden Photonics

View a poster that describes the original NPL Laser Beam Propagation Analyser prototype

For more information, please contact Simon Hall

A microfabricated grating transforms a single
incoming laser beam into a light field specially
tailored for trapping and cooling atoms

Many of the most accurate measurement devices, including atomic clocks, work by observing how atoms transfer between individual quantum states. The longer the atomic transition can be observed, the more precisely it can be measured. Slow-moving ultracold atoms enable the longest observation times and the highest precision. By illuminating the atoms with laser light, the Doppler effect is used to cool them down to microkelvin temperatures, a task normally achieved in a large apparatus.

Complementary approaches to microfabricate the prototype chips were developed by NPL and Imperial College London. Following this, the team further developed the technology which can make an important contribution to metrology and high-precision measurements by enabling atomic quantum sensors to be miniaturised. Advanced versions of the specialised optical diffraction gratings were co-designed by the groups in the collaboration and microfabricated by Kelvin Nanotechnology Ltd using Glasgow's James Watt Nanofabrication Centre.

These researchers have developed a technology which enables a far more compact optical setup than previously, yet it can still cool and trap large numbers of atoms for use in portable instruments. They pattern the surface of a semiconductor chip to form a diffraction grating, splitting a laser into several beams that trap and cool the atoms.

Portable clocks, magnetometers and accelerometers have wide-ranging applications, including navigation on earth and in space, telecomunications, geological exploration, and medical imaging.

This atom chip follows on from NPL's recent demonstration of a novel ion microtrap chip, which appeared in Nature Nanotechnology in 2012.

Read the full letter in Nature Nanotechnology: A surface-pattered chip as a strong source of ultracold atoms for quantum technologies

Read Cold atoms: Trapped by nanostructures in Nature Nanotechnology - News and Views - that accompanies the letter.

Find out more about how laser cooling works

More on NPL's work on Quantum Detection

For further details, please contact Alastair Sinclair