Viscous cavity damping of a microlever in a simple fluid

Abstract

We consider the problem of oscillation damping in air of a thermally actuated microlever as it is gradually approached towards an infinite wall in parallel geometry. As the gap is decreased from 20 nm down to 400 nm, we observe the increasing damping of the lever Brownian motion in the fluid laminar regime. This manifests itself as a linear decrease with distance of the lever quality factor accompanied by a dramatic softening of its resonance, and eventually leads to the freezing of the CL oscillation. We are able to quantitatively explain this behavior by analytically solving the Navier-Stokes equation with perfect slip boundary conditions. Our findings may have implications for microfluidics and micro- nano-electromechanical applications.

arXiv commentPhys. Rev. Lett.: submitted 6 February 2009 ; Editorially approved for publication 3 June 2009

References in corpus (6)

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• The stochastic dynamics of nanoscale mechanical oscillators immersed in a viscous fluid
• Measurements of the Casimir-Lifshitz force in fluids: the effect of electrostatic forces and Debye screening
• Dynamical Response of Nanomechanical Oscillators in Immiscible Viscous Fluid for in vitro Biomolecular Recognition
• Mechanical mode dependence of bolometric back-action in an AFM microlever
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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Casimir force measurements in Au-Au and Au-Si cavities at low temperature
• Slippage and boundary layer probed in an almost-ideal gas by a nano-mechanical oscillator
• Large variation in the boundary-condition slippage for a rarefied gas flowing between two surfaces
• Giant slip lengths of a simple fluid at vibrating solid interfaces
• Hydrodynamic stress correlations in fluid films driven by stochastic surface forcing
• Variable frequency characterization of interaction at nanoscale in linear dynamic AFM: an FFM primer