Optimal Sensing of Momentum Kicks with a Feedback-Controlled Nanomechanical Resonator

TL;DR

This paper presents a feedback-controlled approach to optimally sense individual momentum kicks on nanomechanical resonators, improving detection of rare events like dark matter interactions and enabling new mass spectrometry techniques.

Contribution

It introduces an optimal estimation scheme for extracting single momentum kicks from resonator trajectories while maintaining linearity through feedback control, demonstrated experimentally.

Findings

Enhanced detection of rare momentum kicks.

Feasibility of single-molecule mass spectrometry.

Validated approach on a SiN trampoline resonator.

Abstract

External disturbances exciting a mechanical resonator can be exploited to gain information on the environment. Many of these interactions manifest as momentum kicks, such as the recoil of residual gas, radioactive decay, or even hypothetical interactions with dark matter. These disturbances are often rare enough that they can be resolved as singular events rather than cumulated as force noise. While high-Q resonators with low masses are particularly sensitive to such momentum kicks, they will strongly excite the resonator, leading to nonlinear effects that deteriorate the sensing performance. Hence, this paper utilizes optimal estimation methods to extract individual momentum kicks from measured stochastic trajectories of a mechanical resonator kept in the linear regime through feedback control. The developed scheme is illustrated and tested experimentally using a pre-stressed SiN trampoline resonator. Apart from enhancing a wide range of sensing scenarios mentioned above, our results indicate the feasibility of novel single-molecule mass spectrometry approaches.