Nanometre-scale displacement sensing using a single electron transistor

Robert G. Knobel and Andrew N. Cleland ()
Additional contact information
Robert G. Knobel: University of California
Andrew N. Cleland: University of California

Nature, 2003, vol. 424, issue 6946, 291-293

Abstract: Abstract It has been a long-standing goal to detect the effects of quantum mechanics on a macroscopic mechanical oscillator1,2,3. Position measurements of an oscillator are ultimately limited by quantum mechanics, where ‘zero-point motion’ fluctuations in the quantum ground state combine with the uncertainty relation to yield a lower limit on the measured average displacement. Development of a position transducer, integrated with a mechanical resonator, that can approach this limit could have important applications in the detection of very weak forces, for example in magnetic resonance force microsopy4 and a variety of other precision experiments5,6,7. One implementation that might allow near quantum-limited sensitivity is to use a single electron transistor (SET) as a displacement sensor8,9,10,11: the exquisite charge sensitivity of the SET at cryogenic temperatures is exploited to measure motion by capacitively coupling it to the mechanical resonator. Here we present the experimental realization of such a device, yielding an unequalled displacement sensitivity of 2 × 10-15 m Hz-1/2 for a 116-MHz mechanical oscillator at a temperature of 30 mK—a sensitivity roughly a factor of 100 larger than the quantum limit for this oscillator.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01773 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:424:y:2003:i:6946:d:10.1038_nature01773

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature01773

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().