Parallel measurements of vibrational modes in a few-layer graphene nanomechanical resonator using software-defined radio dongles

Abstract

Software-defined radio dongles are small and inexpensive receivers well known to amateur radio enthusiasts. When connected to an antenna, they enable monitoring of a wide range of the radio spectrum by conditioning the input signal and transferring a downconverted version of it to a personal computer for software processing. Here, we employ a composite of two such dongles, interfaced with codes written in MATLAB and GNU Radio, as a measuring instrument to study the flexural vibrations of a few-layer graphene nanomechanical resonator. Instead of an antenna, we connect the dongles to the split output of a photodetector used to detect vibrations optically. We first perform a quantitative analysis of the dynamics of the first vibrational mode. We then measure the response of the first two vibrational modes in parallel. To illustrate our technique, we detect changes in the vibrational amplitude of both modes induced by periodic strain modulation with a delay of $\approx 1$ ms between measurements. Last, we show that our software-based instrument can be employed to demodulate human voice encoded in the vibrations of our resonator. For parallel measurements of several frequency channels, and provided that the input signal is not too weak, our composite system may offer an alternative to the use of multiple lock-in amplifiers or multiple spectrum analyzers, with the distinct advantage of being cost-effective per frequency channel.

16 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (14)

• A tunable carbon nanotube electromechanical oscillator
• A Mechanical Mass Sensor with Yoctogram Resolution
• Graphene mechanical oscillators with tunable frequency
• Colors Of Graphite On Silicon Dioxide
• Optomechanical coupling between a multilayer graphene mechanical resonator and a superconducting microwave cavity
• Nanotube mechanical resonators with quality factors of up to 5 million
• Probing thermal expansion of graphene and modal dispersion at low-temperature using graphene NEMS resonators
• Coupling graphene mechanical resonators to superconducting microwave cavities
• Dynamical strong coupling and parametric amplification in mechanical modes of graphene drums
• Nanoelectromechanical Sensors based on Suspended 2D Materials
• Neutral particle Mass Spectrometry with Nanomechanical Systems
• Stamp transferred suspended graphene mechanical resonators for radio-frequency electrical readout
• Local Optical Probe of Motion and Stress in a multilayer graphene NEMS
• Graphene resonator as an ultrasound detector for generalized Love waves in a polymer film with two level states