The Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) is Germany’s national metrology institute. It is an institution for science and technology and the highest technical authority of the Federal Republic of Germanyfor the field of metrology and certain sectors of safety engineering. PTB comes under the auspices of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. It meets the requirements for calibration and testing laboratories as defined in the EN ISO/IEC 17025. It has a staff of about 1600 employees of whom about 500 are graduates. It is fundamental task of PTB to realise and maintain the legal units in compliance with the International System of Units (SI) and to disseminate them.

PTB, has spectrometric activities in the near infrared based on a tuneable diode lasers and in the mid infrared based on 4.6- and 5.3-μm-quantum cascade lasers. These setups were used with the traceable infrared laser-spectrometric amount fraction measurement (TILSAM) method [1]. PTB is also active in molecular line strength measurements [2]. At present, PTB is incorporating a 20-years experienced tuneablendiode laser-group of Prof. V. Ebert [3,4], moving from the Heidelberg University to the PTB working group for spectrometric gas analysis.

PTB is operating this joint group of spectroscopists coming from the metrology-in-chemistry area and the academic laser diagnostics community (Prof. Dr. V. Ebert: Universität Heidelberg, TH-Darmstadt). Expertise from this synergetic combination shall merge into the JRP [3-9]. This is explicitly referring to the expertise in line strength measurements [2,8], spectrometric facilities for atmospheric sensing [9], multi component line data evaluation [5,7], and spectrometric method development [6,7,11] available in the PTB-group of V. Ebert.

PTB’ spectroscopy group is also active in the iMERA-plus “Breath Analysis” project (T2.J02) [10] and the EMRP project ENG01-GAS [11].