Electrically-tunable graphene nanomechanical resonators

TL;DR

This review paper discusses the recent advancements in electrically tunable graphene nanomechanical resonators, highlighting their properties, fabrication, and potential applications in classical and quantum systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the design, electrical control, and application prospects of graphene nanomechanical resonators, emphasizing recent progress and future challenges.

Findings

Electrical gating effectively tunes resonant frequencies and nonlinearities.

Graphene resonators exhibit high quality factors and strong mode coupling.

Potential applications include quantum sensing and signal processing.

Abstract

The excellent mechanical properties make graphene promising for realizing nanomechanical resonators with high resonant frequencies, large quality factors, strong nonlinearities, and the capability to effectively interface with various physical systems. Equipped with gate electrodes, it has been demonstrated that these exceptional device properties can be electrically manipulated, leading to a variety of nanomechanical/acoustic applications. Here, we review the recent progress of graphene nanomechanical resonators with a focus on their electrical tunability. First, we provide an overview of different graphene nanomechanical resonators, including their device structures, fabrication methods, and measurement setups. Then, the key mechanical properties of these devices, for example, resonant frequencies, nonlinearities, dissipations, and mode coupling mechanisms, are discussed, with their behaviors upon electrical gating being highlighted. After that, various potential classical/quantum applications based on these graphene nanomechanical resonators are reviewed. Finally, we briefly discuss challenges and opportunities in this field to offer future prospects of the ongoing studies on graphene nanomechanical resonators.