Gold Nanodrum Resonators

Jialu Li, Ash Dyer, Dan Smith, Paul Mulvaney

ACS Nano 17, 20, 20551–20559 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.3c07334

Nanodrum resonators have been fabricated using nanometer-thick gold films as the drumheads. The fabrication method is favorable for large-area array manufacture of arbitrary shapes. The drum resonators exhibit fundamental mode vibration frequencies in the MHz regime. We use the stretched-plate model to describe the natural vibrations of the drum. The Q factor of the fundamental mode increases as the thickness of the drum increases and decreases as the drum diameter goes up. The highest Q factor of the fundamental mode reaches 290 at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. Based on the deduced material properties we estimate that the resonator has a mass sensitivity of 1.11 × 10^–22 g/Hz.