Real-time vibrations of a carbon nanotube

Author(s)

Barnard, Arthur W. ^{[1, 2, 3]} ; Zhang, Mian ^{[2, 4, 5]} ; Wiederhecker, Gustavo S. ^{[6, 5]} ; Lipson, Michal ^{[7, 5, 8]} ; McEuen, Paul L. ^{[3, 8]}

Affiliation

^[1] Stanford Univ, Dept Phys, Stanford, CA 94305 - USA

^[2] Cornell Univ, Sch Appl & Engn Phys, Ithaca, NY 14853 - USA

^[3] Cornell Univ, Lab Atom & Solid State Phys, Ithaca, NY 14850 - USA

^[4] Harvard Univ, John A Paulson Sch Engn & Appl Sci, Cambridge, MA 02138 - USA

^[5] Cornell Univ, Sch Elect & Comp Engn, Ithaca, NY 14850 - USA

^[6] Univ Estadual Campinas, Gleb Wataghin Phys Inst, Campinas, SP - Brazil

^[7] Columbia Univ, Elect Engn, New York, NY 10027 - USA

^[8] Cornell Univ, Kavli Inst Cornell Nanoscale Sci, Ithaca, NY 14850 - USA

• Document type: Journal article
• Source: Nature; v. 566, n. 7742, p. 89+, FEB 7 2019.
• Web of Science Citations: 4

Abstract

The field of miniature mechanical oscillators is rapidly evolving, with emerging applications including signal processing, biological detection(1) and fundamental tests of quantum mechanics(2). As the dimensions of a mechanical oscillator shrink to the molecular scale, such as in a carbon nanotube resonator(3-7), their vibrations become increasingly coupled and strongly interacting(8,9) until even weak thermal fluctuations could make the oscillator nonlinear(10-13). The mechanics at this scale possesses rich dynamics, unexplored because an efficient way of detecting the motion in real time is lacking. Here we directly measure the thermal vibrations of a carbon nanotube in real time using a high-finesse micrometre-scale silicon nitride optical cavity as a sensitive photonic microscope. With the high displacement sensitivity of 700 fm Hz(-1/2) and the fine time resolution of this technique, we were able to discover a realm of dynamics undetected by previous time-averaged measurements and a room-temperature coherence that is nearly three orders of magnitude longer than previously reported. We find that the discrepancy in the coherence stems from long-time non-equilibrium dynamics, analogous to the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou recurrence seen in nonlinear systems(14). Our data unveil the emergence of a weakly chaotic mechanical breather(15), in which vibrational energy is recurrently shared among several resonance modes-dynamics that we are able to reproduce using a simple numerical model. These experiments open up the study of nonlinear mechanical systems in the Brownian limit (that is, when a system is driven solely by thermal fluctuations) and present an integrated, sensitive, high-bandwidth nanophotonic interface for carbon nanotube resonators. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 12/17765-7 - Nanophotonics in Group IV and III-V semiconductors
• Grantee: Gustavo Silva Wiederhecker
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Young Investigators Grants