We report the observation of discrete displacement of nanomechanical oscillators with gigahertz-range resonance frequencies at millikelvin temperatures. The oscillators are nanomachined single-crystal structures of silicon, designed to provide two distinct sets of coupled elements with very low and very high frequencies. With this novel design, femtometer-level displacement of the frequency-determining element is amplified into collective motion of the entire micron-sized structure. The observed discrete response possibly results from energy quantization at the onset of the quantum regime in these macroscopic nanomechanical oscillators.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0503260,
title = {Evidence for Quantized Displacement in Macroscopic Nanomechanical Oscillators},
author = {Alexei Gaidarzhy and Guiti Zolfagharkhani and Robert L. Badzey and Pritiraj Mohanty},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0503260},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, two-column format. Related papers available at http://nano.bu.edu/