High quality mechanical and optical properties of commercial silicon nitride membranes

By B. Zwickl, W. Shanks, A. Jayich, C. Yang, A. Jayich, J. Thompson, J. G. Harris. 2007

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have measured the optical and mechanical loss of commercial silicon nitride membranes. We find that 50nm thick, 1mm2 membranes have mechanical Q>106 at 293K, and Q>107 at 300mK, well above what has been observed in devices with comparable dimensions. The near-IR optical loss at 293K is less than 2×10−4. This combination of properties make these membranes attractive candidates for studying quantum effects in optomechanical systems.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af50073c2b5d611471d52c85a552031328248ae3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Ultralow-Noise SiN Trampoline Resonators for Sensing and Optomechanics (2015, background): “Furthermore, if Qm follows the trend for nitride, namely, increasing by a factor of 10–100 at low temperature [32,35], these devices could, in principle, achieve about 14 zN=Hz1=2 at 14 mK [32], a value approaching that of a nanotube [3,36], but with a significantly larger, stiffer platform amenable”
Bidirectional and efficient conversion between microwave and optical light (2013, methodology): “In particular, the type of silicon nitride membrane we use is capable of extremely high quality factors of Q > 10(7) [39, 46, 50], about two orders of magnitude greater than the quality factors used in this work.”
Strong and tunable nonlinear optomechanical coupling in a low-loss system (2010, background): “2×10(7) was demonstrated in similar membranes at T = 300 mK.(21)”
Demonstration of an ultracold micro-optomechanical oscillator in a cryogenic cavity (2009, background): “The mechanical properties of our design are dominated by the Si 3 N 4 , which is known to exhibit superior performance in particular at low temperatures, where Q -factors beyond 10 6 have been observed at millikelvin temperature”
Dispersive optomechanics: a membrane inside a cavity (2008, background): “The exceptional mechanical properties of these membranes have been described elsewhere [28].”
Measuring nanomechanical motion with a microwave cavity interferometer (2008, background): “This quality factor is surprisingly, yet pleasingly, large for a beam fabricated from an amorphous metal and of this surface-to-volume rati”