NOTICE OF INTENT-Cryogenic Positioners

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Acquisition Management Division, intends to negotiate with Renaissance Scientific, LLC, located in Boulder, CO, on a sole source basis under the authority of FAR Subpart 13.106-1(b), soliciting from a single source to purchase Cryogenic Positioners.       

NIST has a requirement to purchase two low-power X-Y-Z positioning stages for direct use at 20 mK in a dilution refrigerator with position encoding and closed-loop controllers. The stages shall be usable at 20 mK and result in minimal heating of the stage, reducing warmup and keeping the time to cool the temperature of the mixing stage back to 20 mK as short as possible. The materials shall be non-magnetic as superconducting circuits sensitive to magnetic fields will be tested. The materials shall be non-superconducting to 10 mK to keep thermal conductivity high to allow for cooldown to 10 mK without the use of magnetic fields, which are incompatible with many of the superconducting circuits NIST wishes to test.

The NAICS Code is 541713, Research and Development in Nanotechnology, with a small business size standard of 1,000 employees. NIST anticipates negotiating and awarding a firm-fixed-price contract to Renaissance Scientific for this requirement.

Interested parties that can demonstrate they could satisfy the requirement listed above for NIST must clearly and unambiguously identify their capability to do so in writing on or before the response date for this notice. This notice of intent is not a solicitation. Information submitted in response to this notice will be used solely to determine whether competitive procedures could be used for this acquisition. If competitive procedures are not used it is estimated that an award will be issued by April 14, 2022. Any questions regarding this notice must be submitted in writing via email to angela.hitt@nist.gov. All responses to this notice of intent must be submitted to angela.hitt@nist.gov no later than March 2, 2022, at 11 a.m. MST.