Fabrication of superconducting nanomechanical resonators for quantum research, detectors and devices traditionally relies on a lithographic process, resulting in oscillators with sharp edges and a suspended length limited to a few 100 micrometres. We report a low-investment top-down approach to fabricating NbTi nanowire resonators with suspended lengths up to several millimetres and diameters down to 100 nanometres. The nanowires possess high critical currents and fields, making them a natural choice for magnetomotive actuation and sensing. This fabrication technique is independent of the substrate material, dimensions and layout and can readily be adapted to fabricate nanowire resonators from any metal or alloy with suitable ductility and yield strength. Our work thus opens access to a new class of nanomechanical devices with applications including microscopic and mesoscopic investigations of quantum fluids, detecting dark matter and fundamental materials research in one-dimensional superconductors in vacuum.
@article{arxiv.2311.02452,
title = {Long nanomechanical resonators with circular cross-section},
author = {Samuli Autti and Andrew Casey and Marie Connelly and Neda Darvishi and Paolo Franchini and James Gorman and Richard P. Haley and Petri J. Heikkinen and Ashlea Kemp and Elizabeth Leason and John March-Russell and Jocelyn Monroe and Theo Noble and George R. Pickett and Jonathan R. Prance and Xavier Rojas and Tineke Salmon and John Saunders and Jack Slater and Robert Smith and Michael D. Thompson and Stephen M. West and Luke Whitehead and Vladislav V. Zavjalov and Kuang Zhang and Dmitry E. Zmeev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.02452},
year = {2023}
}