Speaker
Description
Elastic strain engineering utilizes stress to realize unusual material properties. Here we show that geometric strain engineering combined with soft-clamping can produce unprecedentedly high quality factor nano-mechanical resonators. Specifically, using a spatially non-uniform phononic crystal pattern, we co-localize the strain and flexural motion of a SiN nano-beam, while increasing the former to near the yield strength. This combined approach produces string-like resonators with room-temperature Q × f > 1015 Hz, far exceeding previous values for a mechanical oscillator of any kind. At room temperature, this device can achieve force sensitivity of ~1 aN / sqrt(Hz), performs hundreds of quantum coherent cycles, and attain Q > 109 at megahertz frequencies.
