Low-Dissipation Nanomechanical Devices from Monocrystalline Silicon Carbide

TL;DR

This paper reports the development of monocrystalline silicon carbide nanomechanical resonators with ultra-low internal damping, achieving record-high quality factors at room temperature, enabling enhanced performance for sensing and quantum applications.

Contribution

The authors fabricated bulk monocrystalline silicon carbide resonators with unprecedented low damping and high quality factors, surpassing previous crystalline silicon carbide devices.

Findings

Achieved damping as low as 2.7 mHz

Reached quality factors up to 20 million at room temperature

Demonstrated volumetric dissipation at the material limit for silicon carbide

Abstract

The applications of nanomechanical resonators range from biomolecule mass sensing to hybrid quantum interfaces. Their performance is often limited by internal material damping, which can be greatly reduced by using crystalline materials. Crystalline silicon carbide is appealing due to its exquisite mechanical, electrical and optical properties, but has suffered from high internal damping due to material defects. Here we resolve this by developing nanomechanical resonators fabricated from bulk monocrystalline 4H-silicon carbide. This allows us to achieve damping as low as 2.7 mHz, more than an order-of-magnitude lower than any previous crystalline silicon carbide resonator and corresponding to a quality factor as high as 20 million at room temperature. The volumetric dissipation of our devices reaches the material limit for silicon carbide for the first time. This provides a path to greatly increase the performance of silicon carbide nanomechanical resonators.