Symmetry breaking in a mechanical resonator made from a carbon nanotube

Abstract

Nanotubes behave as semi-flexible polymers in that they can bend by a sizeable amount. When integrating a nanotube in a mechanical resonator, the bending is expected to break the symmetry of the restoring potential. Here we report on a new detection method that allows us to demonstrate such symmetry breaking. The method probes the motion of the nanotube resonator at nearly zero-frequency; this motion is the low-frequency counterpart of the second overtone of resonantly excited vibrations. We find that symmetry breaking leads to the spectral broadening of mechanical resonances, and to an apparent quality factor that drops below 100 at room temperature. The low quality factor at room temperature is a striking feature of nanotube resonators whose origin has remained elusive for many years. Our results shed light on the role played by symmetry breaking in the mechanics of nanotube resonators.

manuscript and supplementary material, 7 figures

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• Detecting Ultrasound Vibrations by Graphene Resonators
• Interplay of driving and frequency noise in the spectra of vibrational systems
• Observation of decoherence in a carbon nanotube mechanical resonator
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• Suppressing Frequency Fluctuations of Self-Sustained Vibrations in Underdamped Nonlinear Resonators
• DC Signature of snap-through bi-stability in carbon nanotube resonators
• Apparent nonlinear damping triggered by quantum fluctuations
• Transient dynamics of an adiabatic NEMS
• Electrically-tunable graphene nanomechanical resonators
• High Stability Mechanical Frequency Sensing beyond the Linear Regime
• Nanomechanical vibrational response from electrical mixing measurements
• Resonant nonlinear response of a nanomechanical system with broken symmetry