No Arabic abstract
We describe the measurement and modeling of amplitude noise and phase noise in ultra-high Q nanomechanical resonators made from stoichiometric silicon nitride. With quality factors exceeding 2 million, the resonators noise performance is studied with high precision. We find that the amplitude noise can be well described by the thermomechanical model, however, the resonators exhibit sizable extra phase noise due to their intrinsic frequency fluctuations. We develop a method to extract the resonator frequency fluctuation of a driven resonator and obtain a noise spectrum with dependence, which could be attributed to defect motion with broadly distributed relaxation times.
The energy dissipation 1/Q (where Q is the quality factor) and resonance frequency characteristics of single-crystal 3C-SiC ultrahigh frequency (UHF) nanomechanical resonators are measured, for a family of UHF resonators with resonance frequencies of 295MHz, 395MHz, 411MHz, 420MHz, 428MHz, and 482MHz. A temperature dependence of dissipation, 1/Q ~ T^(0.3) has been identified in these 3C-SiC devices. Possible mechanisms that contribute to dissipation in typical doubly-clamped beam UHF resonators are analyzed. Device size and dimensional effects on the dissipation are also examined. Clamping losses are found to be particularly important in these UHF resonators. The resonance frequency decreases as the temperature is increased, and the average frequency temperature coefficient is about -45ppm/K.
We have studied damping in polycrystalline Al nanomechanical resonators by measuring the temperature dependence of their resonance frequency and quality factor over a temperature range of 0.1 - 4 K. Two regimes are clearly distinguished with a crossover temperature of 1 K. Below 1 K we observe a logarithmic temperature dependence of the frequency and linear dependence of damping that cannot be explained by the existing standard models. We attribute these phenomena to the effect of the two-level systems characterized by the unexpectedly long (at least two orders of magnitude longer) relaxation times and discuss possible microscopic models for such systems. We conclude that the dynamics of the two-level systems is dominated by their interaction with one-dimensional phonon modes of the resonators.
Systems with low mechanical dissipation are extensively used in precision measurements such as gravitational wave detection, atomic force microscopy and quantum control of mechanical oscillators via opto- and electromechanics. The mechanical quality factor ($Q$) of these systems determines the thermomechanical force noise and the thermal decoherence rate of mechanical quantum states. While the dissipation rate is typically set by the bulk acoustic properties of the material, by exploiting dissipation dilution, mechanical $Q$ can be engineered through geometry and increased by many orders of magnitude. Recently, soft clamping in combination with strain engineering has enabled room temperature quality factors approaching one billion ($10^9$) in millimeter-scale resonators. Here we demonstrate a new approach to soft clamping which exploits vibrations in the perimeter of polygon-shaped resonators tethered at their vertices. In contrast to previous approaches, which rely on cascaded elements to achieve soft clamping, perimeter modes are soft clamped due to symmetry and the boundary conditions at the polygon vertices. Perimeter modes reach $Q$ of 3.6 billion at room temperature while spanning only two acoustic wavelengths---a 4-fold improvement over the state-of-the-art mechanical $Q$ with 10-fold smaller devices. The small size of our devices makes them well-suited for near-field integration with microcavities for quantum optomechanical experiments. Moreover, their compactness allows the realization of phononic lattices. We demonstrate a one-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Heeger chain of high-$Q$ perimeter modes coupled via nearest-neighbour interaction and characterize the localized edge modes.
Aluminum nitride (AlN) has been widely used in microeletromechanical resonators for its excellent electromechanical properties. Here we demonstrate the use of AlN as an optomechanical material that simultaneously offer low optical and mechanical loss. Integrated AlN microring resonators in the shape of suspended rings exhibit high optical quality factor (Q) with loaded Q up to 125,000. Optomechanical transduction of the Brownian motion of a GHz contour mode yields a displacement sensitivity of 6.2times10^(-18)m/Hz^(1/2) in ambient air.
Low-mass, high-Q, silicon nitride nanostrings are at the cutting edge of nanomechanical devices for sensing applications. Here we show that the addition of a chemically functionalizable gold overlayer does not adversely affect the Q of the fundamental out-of-plane mode. Instead the device retains its mechanical responsiveness while gaining sensitivity to molecular bonding. Furthermore, differences in thermal expansion within the bilayer give rise to internal stresses that can be electrically controlled. In particular, an alternating current excites resonant motion of the nanostring. This AC thermoelastic actuation is simple, robust, and provides an integrated approach to sensor actuation.