Wireless actuation of micromechanical resonators

High-frequency micromechanical columnar resonators.

High-frequency silicon columnar microresonators are fabricated using a simple but effective technological scheme. An optimized fabrication scheme was invented to obtain mechanically protected microcolumns with lateral dimensions controlled on a scale of at least 1 μm. In this paper, we investigate the influence of the environmental conditions on the mechanical resonator properties. At ambient c...

Nonlinear Dynamics of Nanomechanical and Micromechanical Resonators

Electrostatic actuation of silicon optomechanical resonators.

Cavity optomechanical systems offer one of the most sensitive methods for detecting mechanical motion using shifts in the optical resonance frequency of the optomechanical resonator. Presently, these systems are used for measuring mechanical thermal noise displacement or mechanical motion actuated by optical forces. Electrostatic capacitive actuation and detection have been shown previously for...

Gallium nitride micromechanical resonators for IR detection

This paper reports on a novel technology for low-noise un-cooled detection of infrared (IR) radiation using a combination of piezoelectric, pyroelectric, electrostrictive, and resonant effects. The architecture consists of a parallel array of high-Q gallium nitride (GaN) micro-mechanical resonators coated with an IR absorbing nanocomposite. The nanocomposite absorber converts the IR energy into...

Functionalized Micromechanical Resonators with High Quality Factors

The dissipation of mechanical energy in 250-nm-thick, MHz-range silicon resonators is found to be strongly dependent on the chemical nature of the surface. As a result, sub-monolayer changes in the termination of 250-nm-thick resonators lead to significant changes in quality (Q) factor. The chemical origins of this effect are under investigation. Strategies for the formation of arbitrarily func...