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In an arranged marriage of optics and mechanics, physicists have created microscopic structural beams that have a variety of powerful uses when light strikes
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new device that measures the motion of super-tiny particles traversing
You may have seen it on CSI: The star examines hair from a crime scene and concludes its color or texture looks like the defendant’s hair, or maybe his dog’s
Plasmonic materials are composed of metals and insulators that are ordered in geometric arrangements with dimensions that are fractions of the wavelength of light. Research groups are experimenting with a variety of geometric approaches, but all aim
to exploit surface plasmons, which are light
MEMS/NEMS are enabling technologies that bring new functionalities with the potential to radically transform markets ranging from consumer products to national defense. The meteoric rise of the smartphone is an excellent example, in which MEMS accelerometers, gyroscopes, microphones, displays, and
The Nanomechanical Properties Group has expertise in a wide variety of SPM techniques, especially atomic force microscopy (AFM); however, the main research thrust for the Group’s standards project area deals with accurate cantilever stiffness calibration and the use and development of AFM methods
The mechanical behavior for polymers is very sensitive to the deformation rate of the impact test. Thus we are developing and applying several novel measurements that can study the mechanical response of the polymer at different deformation rates and at different material length scales. High-rate
Diego Perez Morelo, Mingkang Wang, Venkatesh Madhaven, Mogana Sathisivan, Charlie Tay, Vladimir Aksyuk
Chip-scale planar nanofabricated optomechanical devices that optically couple a mechanical moving nanostructure to an on-chip photonic cavity of high quality
The ability to prepare a macroscopic mechanical resonator into a quantum superposition state is an outstanding goal of cavity optomechanics. Here, we propose a
Mingkang Wang, Diego Perez Morelo, Georg Ramer, Georges Pavlidis, Jeffrey Schwartz, Liya Yu, Robert Ilic, Andrea Centrone, Vladimir Aksyuk
Thermal fluctuations often impose both fundamental and practical measurement limits on high-performance sensors, motivating the development of techniques that
Richard S. Gates, William Alexander Osborn, Mark McLean, Gordon A. Shaw, James J. Filliben
A batch of 94 silicon chips containing arrays of uniform rectangular cantilevers were microfabricated from a single silicon wafer and their stiffnesses and