Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

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

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

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)

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

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.

Read the full story.

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

A schematic of a crystal shows electrons flowing diagonally across it and affecting a line of neodymium atoms.

Scientists Discover Crystal Exhibiting Exotic Spiral Magnetism

Illustration shows green molecules forming a cell membrane on a black background.

Neutrons Help Measure Cell Membrane Viscosity — and Reveal Its Basis

Multicolored plastic polymers on a pink background, as shown through a microscope.

Spotlight: The Behavior of Polymers in Our Recycled Plastics

Stay in Touch

Upcoming Events

Facilitating a Circular Economy for Textiles

Tue, Sep 21 - Thu, Sep 23 2021

As part of a NIST initiative on Facilitating a Circular Economy for Textiles, we are planning to host a workshop to