An atomic-resolution nanomechanical mass sensor.

By K. Jensen, Kwanpyo Kim, A. Zettl. Nature Nanotechnology, 2008

1,010 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mechanical resonators are widely used as inertial balances to detect small quantities of adsorbed mass through shifts in oscillation frequency. Advances in lithography and materials synthesis have enabled the fabrication of nanoscale mechanical resonators, which have been operated as precision force, position and mass sensors. Here we demonstrate a room-temperature, carbon-nanotube-based nanomechanical resonator with atomic mass resolution. This device is essentially a mass spectrometer with a mass sensitivity of 1.3 x 10(-25) kg Hz(-1/2) or, equivalently, 0.40 gold atoms Hz(-1/2). Using this extreme mass sensitivity, we observe atomic mass shot noise, which is analogous to the electronic shot noise measured in many semiconductor experiments. Unlike traditional mass spectrometers, nanomechanical mass spectrometers do not require the potentially destructive ionization of the test sample, are more sensitive to large molecules, and could eventually be incorporated on a chip.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/537e278b5adc041db557daabc59c4a6e191c4ab2

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In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Menno Poot
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Citations in the corpus

• Enhancing Parametric Sensitivity in Electrically Coupled MEMS Resonators (2009, methodology): “The naturally high frequency sensitivity to variations in the structural properties of a micromechanical resonator [6], [7] and the quasi-digital nature of the signal [1] make this method very attractive for”
• Performance of monolayer graphene nanomechanical resonators with electrical readout. (2009, result): “This is a somewhat larger mass than recently demonstrated using nanotube”
• Production, properties and potential of graphene (2010, background): “An alternative to electrical detection scheme is to exploit the electromechanical behaviour of suspended graphene in analogy to carbon nanotube nanomechanical sensors that have been demonstrated to reach single atom sensitivity.[222] The large area and stiffness of suspended graphene and its very sp”
• Ultralow-Noise SiN Trampoline Resonators for Sensing and Optomechanics (2015, background): “In light of this, the phrase “the lowest among solid-state mechanical sensors” (sentence 3 of abstract and sentence 2 of paragraph 3) should be replaced with “comparable to that of electron-beam patterned graphene layers [4], and approaching that of silicon nanowires [2] and carbon nanotubes [3].”
• Near-field cavity optomechanics with nanomechanical oscillators (2009, background): “Moreover, they are the basis of various precision measurement”