English

Compact fiber optical interferometer technique to measure picometer displacements in biological piezoelectric materials

Instrumentation and Detectors 2020-01-08 v1

Abstract

A simple and robust fiber optical interferometer was developed to non-invasively study the weak piezoelectric effect from thin samples. A biological sample from inter-molt dactyl clubs obtained from the mantis shrimp was used as the test sample. The non-contact technique can measure displacements better than 0.5 picometer for samples subjected to large electric fields. The approach utilizes the phase dependent detection of an oscillating cavity at different frequencies from 0.5 kHz to 2.0 kHz. The piezoelectric constant of the biological samples was calculated from the optical interference fringes and determined to be in the range of 0.3-0.5 pm/V. The noise of 20 fm/Hz^0.5 in the setup is primarily due to thermally associated strains from current flow to the sample electrodes during the measurement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.10970,
  title  = {Compact fiber optical interferometer technique to measure picometer displacements in biological piezoelectric materials},
  author = {Mingyue Liu and Nicholas Yaraghi and Jun Xu and David Kisailus and Umar Mohideen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.10970},
  year   = {2020}
}