Description

Recent developments in nanofabrication techniques have now made it possible to engineer Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems (NEMS), which can probe extremely small accelerations, forces, displacements, masses, and torques. The sensitivity of these devices has now reached the ultimate limit imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics. These quantum-limited sensors are of great interest to many fields of research and applications. They can be used as highly sensitive detectors (e.g scanning microscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers) and may provide the path towards fundamental tests of quantum mechanics into a regime of size and mass previously inaccessible to experiments.

In our group, we are fabricating our NEMS devices with low-loss materials such as silicon nitride (SiN) using nanofabrication techniques, for applications in the ultra-low temperature environment (T below 1 mK) available in our laboratory. We are developing novel and very sensitive measurement techniques for our NEMS devices, based a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) detection. With this platform, we are able to bring our mechanical resonator into the quantum regime. Our main goal is to explore their quantum regime, as well as, their coupling to quantum fluids such as liquid helium.