Strained crystalline nanomechanical resonators with ultralow dissipation

Abstract

In strained mechanical resonators, the concurrence of tensile stress and geometric nonlinearity dramatically reduces dissipation. This phenomenon, dissipation dilution, is employed in mirror suspensions of gravitational wave interferometers and at the nanoscale, where soft-clamping and strain engineering have allowed extremely high quality factors. However, these techniques have so far only been applied in amorphous materials, specifically silicon nitride. Crystalline materials exhibit significantly lower intrinsic damping at cryogenic temperatures, due to the absence of two level systems in the bulk, as exploited in Weber bars and silicon optomechanical cavities. Applying dissipation dilution engineering to strained crystalline materials could therefore enable extremely low loss nanomechanical resonators, due to the combination of reduced internal friction, high intrinsic strain, and high yield strength. Pioneering work has not yet fully exploited this potential. Here, we demonstrate that single crystal strained silicon, a material developed for high mobility transistors, can be used to realize mechanical resonators with ultralow dissipation. We observe that high aspect ratio ($>10^5$) strained silicon nanostrings support MHz mechanical modes with quality factors exceeding $10^{10}$ at 7 K, a tenfold improvement over values reported in silicon nitride. At 7 K, the thermal noise-limited force sensitivity is approximately $45\mathrm{zN}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ - approaching that of carbon nanotubes - and the heating rate is only 60 quanta-per-second. Our nanomechanical resonators exhibit lower dissipation than the most pristine macroscopic oscillators and their low mass makes them particularly promising for quantum sensing and transduction.

arXiv comment15 pages, 11 figures

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Cited by in corpus (31)

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• Entanglement-Enhanced Optomechanical Sensing
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• Perspectives on high-frequency nanomechanics, nanoacoustics, and nanophononics
• High-Strength Amorphous Silicon Carbide for Nanomechanics
• Challenges and Opportunities of Gravitational Wave Searches above 10 kHz
• Centimeter-scale nanomechanical resonators with low dissipation
• Squeezing-enhanced quantum sensing with quadratic optomechanics
• High-Q trampoline resonators from strained crystalline InGaP for integrated free-space optomechanics
• Programmable Quantum Processors based on Spin Qubits with Mechanically-Mediated Interactions and Transport
• Degeneracy-breaking and Long-lived Multimode Microwave Electromechanical Systems Enabled by Cubic Silicon-Carbide Membrane Crystals
• Sub-ppm Nanomechanical Absorption Spectroscopy of Silicon Nitride
• Nanomechanical crystalline AlN resonators with high quality factors for quantum optoelectromechanics
• Signatures and Detection Prospects for sub-GeV Dark Matter with Superfluid Helium
• Low-Dissipation Nanomechanical Devices from Monocrystalline Silicon Carbide
• Noise and dissipation on a moving mirror induced by the dynamical Casimir emission
• Feedback-cooling the fundamental torsional mechanical mode of a tapered optical fiber to 30 mK
• Long-range optomechanical interactions in SiN membrane arrays
• Electrically-tunable graphene nanomechanical resonators
• Quantitative signal extraction in the dynamic range of nanomechanical systems by free and constrained fitting
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• Relaxation and dynamics of high-stress pre-displaced string resonators
• Towards tunable graphene phononic crystals
• Near-resonant nuclear spin detection with megahertz mechanical resonators
• On-Chip Frequency Noise Cancellation in Nanomechanical Resonators using Cavity Optomechanics
• Soft-clamped silicon nitride string resonators at millikelvin temperatures
• Mechanical Squeezed-Fock Qubit: Towards Quantum Weak-Force Sensing
• High-$Q$ membrane resonators using ultra-high-stress crystalline TiN films
• Effect of Helium Ion Implantation on 3C-SiC Nanomechanical String Resonators