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brightly colored pieces of what looks like latticed fabric in a pile

Materials

Overview

Plastics, carbon nanotubes, high-strength alloys, artificial bone and joint replacements are just some of the emerging materials for which NIST develops testbeds, defines benchmarks, and develops formability measurements and models.

Featured Content

Center for Hierarchical Materials Design

Center for Automotive Lightweighting

Materials Topics

Ceramics

Composites

Concrete / cement

Materials characterization

Metals

Modeling & computational material science

Polymers

Superconductors

The Research

Projects & Programs

JARVIS-ML

Ongoing

JARVIS-ML is a repository of machine learning (ML) model parameters, descriptors, and ML related input and target data. JARVIS-ML is a part of the NIST-JARVIS

Optical and Optoelectronic Materials Characterization

Ongoing

This project aims to develop rigorous measurements and methodology needed for determining optical and electrical properties of advanced materials that might be

PTIR combines the spatial resolution of AFM with the specificity of absorption spectroscopy

Nano-Chemical Imaging and -Spectroscopy (IR, nIR, VIS)

Ongoing

Conventional techniques for analyzing chemical composition, such as infrared (IR) microscopy often miss critically important nanoscale details. To overcome this

A digital object is composed of Data, Metadata, Protocols & Operations, and Persistent Identifiers.

Facilitating the Adoption of the FAIR Digital Object Framework in Material Science

Ongoing

With increasing use of data-driven methodologies, concerns around data discovery, data access, and data interoperability have come to the forefront. Communities

View All Projects/Programs

Additional Resources Links

Publications

Tools & Instruments

Many different rectangular pieces of webby material are all wrapped up in a big ball. The pieces are each colored differently so that you can tell them apart in the bunch. These are meant to represent a graphene melt.

Materials by Design

Every “thing” is made of materials — roads, engines and medical devices, to name just a few examples. For centuries, inventing and developing new materials for industrial applications took long amounts of time and tremendous amounts of trial and error. Speeding up that process could save time and money and spur a great deal of innovation across many sectors of the economy. Read about how NIST's Materials Genome Initiative plans to do just that.

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News

How the JFK Assassination Bullets Were Digitally Preserved at NIST

They were long, round-nosed rifle bullets. Their copper metal jackets had the dull color of a worn penny, giving testimony to their age. The gun-barrel rifling impressions on their sides were typical of a bullet fired from a military weapon: four grooves and the resulting ridges called lands — all these marks twisted toward the right by the barrel’s internal rifling. Alongside the bullets were

Historical newspaper photo shows a large ship in port with a crack down the center, splitting it almost in half.

Spotlight: The Unfortunate Origin of a NIST Metal Toughness Program Still Going Strong

Illustration depicts two bilayers (two double layers) of graphene

Twisted Science: NIST Researchers Find a New Quantum Ruler to Explore Exotic Matter

map showing growth of manufacturing and small-scale supply chain businesses in the US

Biden-Harris Administration Announces CHIPS for America Funding Opportunity to Strengthen Semiconductor Supply Chains

Stay in Touch

Upcoming Events

NIST Food Waste Reduction and Recovery Workshop

Tue, Dec 5 - Thu, Dec 7 2023

NIST’s Circular Economy Program is supporting the nation’s transition from a linear economic model to a cyclical one

Quantum Matters in Materials Science Workshop

Wed, Feb 21 - Thu, Feb 22 2024

As a part of the JARVIS workshops series, NIST is organizing the 3rd Quantum Matters in Materials Science (QMMS)