Related papers: A new capacitive sensor for displacement measureme…
The high flexibility, impermeability and strength of graphene membranes are key properties that can enable the next generation of nanomechanical sensors. However, for capacitive pressure sensors the sensitivity offered by a single suspended…
A photoacoustic (PA) sensor for fast and real-time gas sensing is demonstrated. The PA sensor is a standalone system controlled by a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The PA cell has been designed for flow noise immunity using…
Commonly used wavefront sensors, the Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor and the pyramid wavefront sensor, for example, have large dynamic range or high sensitivity, trading one regime for the other. A new type of wavefront sensor is being…
Materials adsorbed to the surface of a fluid -- for instance, crude oil, biogenic slicks, or industrial/medical surfactants -- will move in response to surface waves. Due to the difficulty of non-invasive measurement of the spatial…
Accurately measuring mechanical displacements is essential for a vast portion of current technologies. Several optical techniques accomplish this task, allowing for non-contact sensing even below the diffraction limit. Here we introduce an…
We present an optomechanical device platform for characterization of optical, thermal, and rheological properties of fluids on the micron scale. A suspended silicon microdisk resonator with a vibrating mass of 100 fg and an effective…
We demonstrate a superconducting inductive technique to measure the displacement of a micromechanical resonator. In our scheme, a type I superconducting microsphere is attached to the free end of a microcantilever and approached to the loop…
We present a superheterodyne-scheme demodulation system which can detect the amplitude and phaseshift of weak radio-frequency signals with extraordinarily high stability and resolution. As a demonstration, we introduce a process to measure…
We demonstrate a new type of optomechanical system employing a movable, micron-scale waveguide evanescently-coupled to a high-Q optical microresonator. Micron-scale displacements of the waveguide are observed for milliwatt(mW)-level optical…
The microfluidic optomechanical resonator (uFOMR) based on a thin-walled glass capillary supports high Q-factor (>1000) mechanical modes in the presence of liquids. In this Letter, the sensitivity of the uFOMR to the surface change is…
This paper proposes a pipeline to automatically track and measure displacement and vibration of structural specimens during laboratory experiments. The latest Mask Regional Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) can locate the targets…
We demonstrate a sensor scheme for nanoscale target displacement that relies on a single Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) subject to optical feedback. The system combines the inherent sensitivity of QCLs to optical re-injection and their…
The field of optical metrology with its high precision position, rotation and wavefront sensors represents the basis for lithography and high resolution microscopy. However, the on-chip integration - a task highly relevant for future…
Surface Acoustic Wave gas sensors have garnered increasing attention as highly sensitive, miniaturized, and wireless compatible platforms for molecular detection. Their unique ability to convert surface perturbations into measurable…
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…
We propose an experiment to observe interference of a single electron as it is transported along two parallel quasi-one-dimensional channels trapped in a single minimum of a travelling periodic electric field. The experimental device is a…
The displacement of micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) cantilevers is used to measure a broad variety of phenomena in devices ranging from force microscopes to biochemical sensors to thermal imaging systems. We demonstrate the first…
We demonstrate the possibility of surpassing the quantum noise limit for simultaneous multi-axis spatial displacement measurements that have zero mean values. The requisite resources for these measurements are squeezed light beams with…
We present a new method to measure rheological response of liquids confined to nano-scale which exhibit a considerable slow-down in dynamics compared to bulk liquids. The method relies on using a robust force sensor that has a sensitivity…
An ultra-sensitive opto-mechanical force sensor has been built and tested in the optics laboratory at INFN Trieste. Its application to experiments in the Dark Energy sector, such as those for Chameleon-type WISPs, is particularly…