Related papers: Low-temperature AFM with a microwave cavity optome…
Nanomechanical oscillators have been employed as transducers to measure force, mass and charge with high sensitivity. They are also used in opto- or electromechanical experiments with the goal of quantum control and phenomena of mechanical…
Oscillators based on levitated particles are promising for the development of ultrasensitive force detectors. The theoretical performance of levitated nanomechanical sensors is usually characterized by the so-called thermal noise limit…
Nowadays, silicon micro-cantilevers with different geometrical shapes are widely used as micro-electro-mechanical systems and, more recently, as force sensor probes in atomic force microscopy (AFM). During the last ten years, several…
Ambient operation poses a challenge to AFM because in contrast to operation in vacuum or liquid environments, the cantilever dynamics change dramatically from oscillating in air to oscillating in a hydration layer when probing the sample.…
Recent advances in the fabrication of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and their evolution into nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) have allowed researchers to measure extremely small forces, masses, and displacements. In particular,…
Conventional dynamic atomic force microscopy (AFM) can be extended to bimodal and multimodal AFM in which the cantilever is simultaneously excited at two ore more resonance frequencies. Such excitation schemes result in one additional…
Photo-induced forces can be used to manipulate and cool the mechanical motion of oscillators. When the oscillator is used as a force sensor, such as in atomic force microscopy, active feedback is an enticing route to enhancing measurement…
An electro-mechanical setup for the measurement of AC-forces in a low-temperature tunnelling microscope has been developed, which enables extremely high force resolution. The crosstalk of vibrations onto the tunnelling current is used to…
Atomic force microscopy is an important tool for characterizing surface acoustic waves, in particular for high frequencies, where the wavelength is too short to be resolved by laser interferometry. A caveat is, that the cantilever…
Cooling down nanomechanical force probes is a generic strategy to enhance their sensitivities through the concomitant reduction of their thermal noise and mechanical damping rates. However, heat conduction mechanisms become less efficient…
We consider a far infrared (terahertz), room-temperature detector based on a microcantilever sensor of the radiation pressure. This system has a significantly higher sensitivity than existing uncooled detectors in the far infrared…
Highly coherent mechanical resonators are invaluable to ultrasensitive detection techniques by enabling detection of small forces. Studying mechanical resonators in a thermal equilibrium state at millikelvin temperatures provides a…
Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) methods utilizing resonant mechanical vibrations of cantilevers in contact with a sample surface have shown sensitivities as high as few picometers for detecting surface displacements. Such a high sensitivity…
Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have been applied to many measurement problems in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine. In parallel, cavity optomechanical systems have achieved quantum-limited displacement sensitivity and ground…
The dynamic behavior of AFM is studied taking into account the nonlinear interaction forces between probe and sample. The exerted forces on the free end of micro-beam are simulated with the third degree polynomial. The effect of some…
In atomic force microscopy (AFM), the angle relative to the vertical ($\theta_{i}$) that the tip apex of a cantilever moves is determined by the tilt of the probe holder and the geometries of the cantilever and actuated eigenmode $i$. Even…
Micromechanical transducers such as cantilevers for AFM often rely on optical readout methods that require illumination of a specific region of the microstructure. Here we explore and exploit the diffraction effects that have been…
We consider mid-infrared (5 to 25 micrometers), optically cooled detectors based on a microcantilever sensor of the radiation pressure. A significant enhancement of sensitivity is achieved due the combination of low effective temperature…
Amplitude-modulation atomic force microscopy (AM-AFM) measures nanoscale surface structures by detecting changes in the cantilever oscillation amplitude, contributing to materials research. AM-AFM can non-destructively observe fragile…
We use a quantum point contact (QPC) as a displacement transducer to measure and control the low-temperature thermal motion of a nearby micromechanical cantilever. The QPC is included in an active feedback loop designed to cool the…