A megahertz nanomechanical resonator with room temperature quality factor over a million

Abstract

We demonstrate the fabrication and operation of high aspect ratio tensile stressed silicon nitride string resonators. We explore the parameter space of small cross sections, on the order of 100nm, and long lengths up to 325μm, demonstrating that such high aspect ratio resonators can be made with standard wet release processing using a material with internal tensile stress. Room temperature quality factors exceed one million at frequencies above 1MHz. The utility of such high quality factor flexural resonators to probe the interaction of high frequency nanoscale devices with rarefied gases is demonstrated.