The National Institute of Metrology (NIM, China) proposed a joule balance method to measure the Planck constant in 2006, and built the first prototype NIM-1 to verify its principle with a relative uncertainty of 8.9 × 10 -6 by 2013. Since 2013, a new joule balance NIM-2 has been designed, with a series of improvements to reduce the measurement uncertainty. By April 2017, NIM-2 has been constructed and can be employed to measure the Planck constant in vacuum. A first measurement on NIM-2 yields a determination of the Planck constant is 6.626 069 2(16) × 10 -34 Js with a relative uncertainty of 2.4 × 10 -7 . The determination differs in relative terms by −1.27 × 10 -7 from the CODATA 2014 value. Further improvement of NIM-2 is still in progress towards 10 -8 level uncertainty in the future.

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Recently, vortex beam carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) for radio communications has attracted much attention for its potential of transmitting multiple signals simultaneously at the same frequency, which can be used to increase the channel capacity. However, most of the methods for getting multi-mode OAM radio beams are of complicated structure and very high cost. This paper provides an effective solution of generating dual circularly-polarized (CP) dual-mode OAM beams. The antenna consists of four dual-CP elements which are sequentially rotated 90 degrees in the clockwise direction. Different from all previous published research relating to OAM generation by phased arrays, the four elements are fed with the same phase for both left-hand circular polarization (LHCP) and right-hand circular polarization (RHCP). The dual-mode operation for OAM is achieved through the opposite phase differences generated for LHCP and RHCP, when the dual-CP elements are sequentially rotated in the clockwise direction. The measured results coincide well with the simulated ones, which verified the effectiveness of the proposed design.

A simple differential capacitive sensor is provided in this paper to measure the absolute positions of length measuring systems. By utilizing a shield window inside the differential capacitor, the measurement range and linearity range of the sensor can reach several millimeters. What is more interesting is that this differential capacitive sensor is only sensitive to one translational degree of freedom (DOF) movement, and immune to the vibration along the other two translational DOFs. In the experiment, we used a novel circuit based on an AC capacitance bridge to directly measure the differential capacitance value. The experimental result shows that this differential capacitive sensor has a sensitivity of 2 × 10−4 pF/μm with 0.08 μm resolution. The measurement range of this differential capacitive sensor is 6 mm, and the linearity error are less than 0.01% over the whole absolute position measurement range.