Physicists at NIST’s Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) have been working on a new class of chip-based photonic thermometers that measure temperature with light. Now the team has reached another key milestone with the creation of a system that tests and packages their photonic thermometers automatically and in a fraction of the time it previously took.

The new tool, which was developed and built by PML Sensor Science Division scientist Nikolai Klimov, allows the researchers to crank out standalone photonic thermometers that are portable and can be rigorously tested in NIST’s facilities.

“This tool is important because to commercialize these sensors, we need to present them in a form factor or shape that people are comfortable with,” says PML’s Zeeshan Ahmed, who leads the photonic thermometry team. “When people think of a thermometer, they think of a cylinder with a wire coming off of it. They don’t think of a chip that just sits on a table.”

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