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Press releases 2013

To make reliable prognoses for climate change, it must be possible to measure the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere with extreme accuracy and reliability. Thanks to a facility which is unique in Europe and is located at the Physikalisch-Technischen Bundesanstalt (PTB), the reference radiators of the ultra-modern atmosphere research instrument GLORIA (Gimballed Limb...

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Most of the time, they come from our natural environment. But sometimes they are due to nuclear weapons tests or to accidents - what we are talking about here are radioactive substances in ground-level air. The Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) has been measuring them for exactly 50 years. Hereby, the scientists are able to detect exceptionally small traces of such substances which...

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Es gibt Messmethoden, die kann jedes Kind anwenden. Zum Beispiel bei Gewitter. Wenn es blitzt, wird gezählt – bis zum Donner. Die gezählten Sekunden geteilt durch 3 ergeben die Entfernung des Gewitters in Kilometern. Was hier zur Anwendung kommt, ist dasselbe Prinzip wie das der Meterdefinition, die in Kürze 30 Jahre alt werden wird. Denn der Berechnung liegt eine konstante Geschwindigkeit...

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Researchers from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), together with FCS Flight Calibration Services GmbH from Braunschweig, have developed a measuring system which, hanging from a helicopter, detects the electric field strength as well as the signal contents of air-traffic control navigation systems with unprecedented accuracy. They had hardly developed this system when a future...

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Graphene, a crystal composed of only one layer of carbon atoms arranged in a regular hexagon, is regarded as a material which is believed to be capable of performing miracles, in particular in the fields of electronics, sensor technology and display technology, but also in metrology. Only four years after the first successful preparation of graphene, its discoverers Geim and Novoselov were...

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Whether you want to investigate objects in space, characterize the quality of light sources, optimize photovoltaics modules or analyze chemical compounds, measuring the spectrum of light- or heat sources is often the method of choice. Conventional procedures thereby generate radiation distribution curves which are distorted and have to be subsequently corrected. The Physikalisch-Technische ...

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Big names in physics and important scientific discoveries characterized the first decades of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) at the end of the 19th and at the start of the 20th centuries. The then Imperial Institute, whose founding fathers were Werner von Siemens and Hermann von Helmholtz, thus laid the experimental foundations of quantum mechanics with their precision ...

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Joint press release of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB)

How far above sea level is a place located? And where exactly is "sea level"? It is one objective of the geodesists to answer these questions with 1 cm accuracy. Conventional measurement procedures or GPS technologies via satellites, however, reach their limits here. Now...

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Der Ex-Dienst, der seit 2003 erfolgreich die verschiedenen im Explosionsschutz tätigen Gruppen verknüpft, wird jetzt als Verein weitergeführt. Damit wollen die Gründungsorganisationen (u. a. die Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, PTB, und die Interessengemeinschaft Automatisierungstechnik der Prozessindustrie, NAMUR), zusätzliche Optionen zur Förderung der Wissenschaft und Forschung im...

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170 Euro Bußgeld und ein einmonatiges Fahrverbot drohten einer Autofahrerin, die beim zu schnellen Fahren von einem Geschwindigkeitsmessgerät geblitzt wurde. Das Gerät, ein Poliscan Speed, war zuvor von der Physikalisch-Technischen Bundesanstalt (PTB) geprüft und zugelassen worden. Doch die Frau erhob Einspruch und das Amtsgericht Aachen urteilte zugunsten der Autofahrerin. In der...

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