Suspended nanochannel resonators at attogram precision

Nanomechanical resonators can quantify individual particles down to a single atom; however the applications are limited due to their degraded performance in solution. Suspended micro- and nanochannel resonators can achieve vacuum level performances for samples in solution since the target analyte fl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cermak, Nathan, Payer, Kristofor Robert, Shen, Wenjiang, Lee, Jungchul, Olcum, Selim A., Wasserman, Steven, Manalis, Scott R
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computational and Systems Biology Program
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/91238
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5223-9433
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5866-4606
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5277-6060
Description
Summary:Nanomechanical resonators can quantify individual particles down to a single atom; however the applications are limited due to their degraded performance in solution. Suspended micro- and nanochannel resonators can achieve vacuum level performances for samples in solution since the target analyte flows through an integrated channel within the resonator. Here we report on a new generation suspended nanochannel resonator (SNR) that operates at approximately 2 MHz with quality factors between 10,000-20,000. The SNR is measured to have a mass sensitivity of 8.2 mHz/attogram. With an optimized oscillator system, we show that the resonator can be oscillated with a mass equivalent frequency stability of 0.85 attogram (4 parts-perbillion) at 1 kHz bandwidth, which is 1.8 times the calculated stability imposed by the thermal noise. We demonstrate the use of this mass resolution by quantifying the mass and concentration of nanoparticles down to 10 nm in solution.