Nanomechanics

News and Updates

Quantum Thermometer or Optical Refrigerator?

June 22, 2017

In an arranged marriage of optics and mechanics, physicists have created microscopic structural beams that have a variety of powerful uses when light strikes

schematic of laser light interacting with a plasmonic gap resonator

NIST Device for Detecting Subatomic-Scale Motion Has Potential Robotics, Homeland Security Applications

December 15, 2016

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new device that measures the motion of super-tiny particles traversing

NIST Unveils Forensic Technique to Measure Mechanical Properties of Evidence

November 1, 2016

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

Projects and Programs

Scanning Probe Microscopy Calibrations and Standards

Ongoing

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

High Impact Ballistic Testing of Polymer Films

Polymer Mechanics

Ongoing

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

Designing the Nanoworld: Nanostructure, Nanodevices, and Nano-optics

Ongoing

Developing and exploiting nanodevices for quantum and nanotechnologies requires nanoscale and atomic scale modeling of ultrasmall structures, devices, their operation, and their response to probes. Key challenges of understanding physics at the quantum/classical interface and measurement at the

Video microscopic image - Rotation and translation.

Control of Magnetic Nanoparticles for Nanoscale Manipulation of Fluids and Materials (Archived)

Completed

Low Reynolds number swimming, or motion through a viscous fluid, is a technique at which nature is adept. Bacteria, protists, and algal cells live in a regime where viscous effects dominate inertial ones. As these microscale biological swimmers move, they perturb the fluid around them, affecting

Publications

Mechanical Sensors for Planck-scale Dark Matter Searches via Long-range Forces

February 14, 2025

Author(s)

Jacob Taylor, Juehang Qin, Dorian Amaral, sunil bhave, Erqian Cai, Daniel Carney, Raphael Lang, Shengchao Li, Claire Marvinney, Alberto Marino, Jared Newton, Christopher Tunnell

Dark matter candidates with masses around the Planck-scale are theoretically well-motivated and have been the subject of numerous studies; it has also been

Integrated photonic optomechanical atomic force microscopy probes batch fabricated using deep UV photolithography

June 3, 2023

Author(s)

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

Nonlinear Sideband Cooling to a Cat State of Motion

May 25, 2023

Author(s)

Bradley Hauer, Joshua Combes, John Teufel

The ability to prepare a macroscopic mechanical resonator into a quantum superposition state is an outstanding goal of cavity optomechanics. Here, we propose a

Beating thermal noise in a dynamic signal measurement by a nanofabricated cavity-optomechanical sensor

March 15, 2023

Author(s)

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