English

Cubic singularities in binary linear electromechanical oscillators

Applied Physics 2025-09-08 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

Singularities arise in diverse disciplines and play a key role in both exploring fundamental laws of physics and making highly-sensitive sensors. Higher-order (>3) singularities, with further improved performance, however, usually require exquisite tuning of multiple (>3) coupled degrees of freedom or nonlinear control, thus severely limiting their applications in practice. Here we propose theoretically and confirm using mechanics experiments that, cubic singularities can be realized in a coupled binary system without any nonlinearity, only by observing the phase tomography of the driven response. By steering the cubic phase-tomographic singularities in an electrostatically-tunable micromechanical system, enhanced cubic-root response to frequency perturbation and voltage-controlled nonreciprocity are demonstrated. Our work opens up a new phase-tomographic method for interacted-system research and sheds new light on building and engineering advanced singular devices with simple and well-controllable elements, with a wide range of applications including precision metrology, portable nonreciprocal devices, and on-chip mechanical computing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.12471,
  title  = {Cubic singularities in binary linear electromechanical oscillators},
  author = {Xin Zhou and Hui Jing and Xingjing Ren and Jianqi Zhang and Ran Huang and Zhipeng Li and Xiaopeng Sun and Xuezhong Wu and Cheng-Wei Qiu and Franco Nori and Dingbang Xiao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.12471},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:48:34.466Z