Determining the direction of a nanowire's flexural vibrations by micro-lens optical fiber interferometer

Abstract

Nanowires are perfect transducers for ultra-sensitive detections of force and mass. For small mass sensing, recent advances in detecting more properties than their masses with high sensitivity for absorbed particles onto a nanowire rely on identifications of two orthogonal flexural vibration modes of the nanowire. The directions of these orthogonal flexural vibrations with respect to measurement direction are crucial parameters of vibration modes. However, previous method, which determines a nanowire's vibration direction using thermal vibrations, requires simultaneously detecting of two orthogonal flexural vibrations of the nanowire with sufficient sensitivity. In this work, we propose and realize a method for the determination of directions of a nanowire's flexural vibrations by micro-lens optical fiber interferometer. Our method combines the light interference and light scattering of the nanowire. It does not require detecting a pair of degenerated orthogonal flexural vibration modes. Therefore, our method is expected to have wide usages in characterizing nanowire's vibrations and their applications.

Force sensing with nanowire cantilevers

“…Another version of this detection scheme uses the interference between light scattered back from the NW and light reflected from the cleaved end of an optical fiber to measure NW displacement [11,76]. In this case, a fiber-based confocal reflection microscope is used to collect the light scattered from the NW, as shown in figure 6 depend on the variations of I R as a function of the NW position in the optical waist [11].…”