We present measurements on nanomechanical resonators machined from Silicon-on-Insulator substrates. The resonators are designed as freely suspended Au/Si beams of lengths on the order of 1 - 4 um and a thickness of 200 nm. The beams are driven into nonlinear response by an applied modulation at radio frequencies and a magnetic field in plane. The strong hysteresis of the magnetomotive response allows sensitive charge detection by varying the electrostatic potential of a gate electrode.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9910334,
title = {Nanomechanical resonators operating as charge detectors in the nonlinear regime},
author = {H. Kroemmer and A. Erbe and A. Tilke and S. Manus and R. H. Blick},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9910334},
year = {2009}
}