United States Naval Research Laboratory

The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. Located in Washington, DC, it was founded in 1923 and conducts basic scientific research, applied research, technological development and prototyping. The laboratory's specialties include plasma physics, space physics, materials science, and tactical electronic warfare. NRL is one of the first US government scientific R&D laboratories, having opened in 1923 at the instigation of Thomas Edison, and is currently under the Office of Naval Research.

As of 2016, NRL was a Navy Working Capital Fund activity, which means it is not a line-item in the US Federal Budget. Instead of direct funding from Congress, all costs, including overhead, were recovered through sponsor-funded research projects. NRL's research expenditures were approximately $1 billion per year.

The Naval Research Laboratory conducts a wide variety of basic research and applied research relevant to the US Navy. NRL scientists and engineers author^[when?] over 1200 openly published research papers in a wide range of conferences, symposia, and journals each year.

It has a history of scientific breakthroughs and technological achievements dating back to its foundation in 1923. In some instances the laboratory's contributions to military technology have been declassified decades after those technologies have become widely adopted.

In 2011, NRL researchers published 1,398 unclassified scientific and technical articles, book chapters and conference proceedings. In 2008, the NRL was ranked No. 3 among all U.S. institutions holding nanotechnology-related patents, behind IBM and the University of California.

Current areas of research at NRL include, for example:

In 2014, the NRL was researching: armor for munitions in transport, high-powered lasers, remote explosives detection, spintronics, the dynamics of explosive gas mixtures, electromagnetic railgun technology, detection of hidden nuclear materials, graphene devices, high-power extremely high frequency (35–220 GHz) amplifiers, acoustic lensing, information-rich orbital coastline mapping, arctic weather forecasting, global aerosol analysis & prediction, high-density plasmas, millisecond pulsars, broadband laser data links, virtual mission operation centers, battery technology, photonic crystals, carbon nanotube electronics, electronic sensors, mechanical nano-resonators, solid-state chemical sensors, organic opto-electronics, neural-electronic interfaces and self-assembling nanostructures.

The laboratory includes a range of R&D facilities. 2014 additions included the NRL Nanoscience Institute's 5,000 sq ft (460 m²) Class 100 nanofabrication cleanroom; quiet and ultra-quiet measurement labs; and the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR).