Abstract

Engineered micro- and nanomechanical resonators with ultra-low dissipation constitute a promising platform for various quantum technologies and foundational research. Traditionally, the improvement of the resonator’s performance through nanomechanical structural engineering has been driven by human intuition and insight. Such an approach is inefficient and leaves aside a plethora of unexplored mechanical designs that potentially achieve better performance. Here, we use a computer-aided inverse design approach known as topology optimization to structurally design mechanical resonators with optimized performance of the fundamental mechanical mode. Using the outcomes of this approach, we fabricate and characterize ultra-coherent nanomechanical resonators with, to the best of our knowledge, record-high Q ⋅ f products for their fundamental mode (where Q is the quality factor and f is the frequency). The proposed approach - which can also be used to improve phononic crystals and coupled-mode resonators - opens up a new paradigm for designing ultra-coherent micro- and nanomechanical resonators, enabling e.g. novel experiments in fundamental physics and extreme sensing.

Highlights

  • Engineered micro- and nanomechanical resonators with ultra-low dissipation constitute a promising platform for various quantum technologies and foundational research

  • Topology optimization is a computational morphogenesis procedure widely applied in engineering to determine the best possible structural design and material distributions within a prescribed design domain by maximizing a set of performance targets[1]

  • We use topology optimization to design a nanomechanical resonator towards maximizing its Q ⋅ f (Qf) product[5,6,7]

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Summary

Introduction

Engineered micro- and nanomechanical resonators with ultra-low dissipation constitute a promising platform for various quantum technologies and foundational research. Improving the resonator’s performance has been done through a combination of human intuition and trial-and-error based on experience and approximative analytical expression for the different dissipation mechanisms of the resonator[8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17] Such an intuition-based approach has recently led to impressive progress in increasing the Qf product of mechanical resonators by using a combination of dissipation dilution[11], soft-clamping[15], thin-clamping[18], and strain engineering[16]. Topology optimization counteracts this problem as it directly develops the optimized structure under given initial design constraints and loss models with no geometrical pre-assumptions

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