We realise a circular gray-field polariscope to image stress-induced birefringence in thin (submicron thick) silicon nitride (SiN) membranes and strings. This enables quantitative mapping of the orientation of principal stresses and stress anisotropy, complementary to, and in agreement with, finite element modeling (FEM). Furthermore, using a sample with a well known stress anisotropy, we extract a new value for the photoelastic (Brewster) coefficient of silicon nitride, C≈(3.4±0.1)×10−6MPa−1. We explore possible applications of the method to analyse and quality-control stressed membranes with phononic crystal patterns
@article{arxiv.1702.01732,
title = {Polarimetric analysis of stress anisotropy in nanomechanical silicon nitride resonators},
author = {Thibault Capelle and Yeghishe Tsaturyan and Andreas Barg and Albert Schliesser},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.01732},
year = {2017}
}