Defoort, M. and Lulla, K. J. and Blanc, C. and Bourgeois, O. and Collin, E. and Armour, A. D. (2013) Modal "self-coupling" as a sensitive probe for nanomechanical detection. Applied Physics Letters, 103 (1): 013104. ISSN 0003-6951
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
We present a high-sensitivity measurement technique for mechanical nanoresonators. Due to intrinsic nonlinear effects, different flexural modes of a nanobeam can be coupled while driving each of them on resonance. This mode-coupling scheme is dispersive and one mode resonance shifts with respect to the motional amplitude of the other. The same idea can be implemented on a single mode, exciting it with two slightly detuned signals. This two-tone scheme is used here to measure the resonance lineshape of one mode through a frequency shift in the response of the device. The method acts as an amplitude-to- frequency transduction which ultimately suffers only from phase noise of the local oscillator used and of the nanomechanical device itself. We also present a theory which reproduces the data without free parameters.