KOUH group @ Kookmin
NANOMECHANICAL MOTION TRANSDUCTION
Mechanical motion has been regaining its place in the science and engineering. Along with the scaling down of the electronic devices, mechanical systems have been miniaturized down to the deep submicron region. Recent development of micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems(NEMS) as well as the microcantilevers in the atomic force microscopy has shown that these mechanical systems can provide unique opportunities in diverse applications such as sensing and signal processing elements. These mechanical devices show small mechanical displacements, typically in the range of nanometer. Therefore much of research effort has been focused on the development of proper motion detection techniques as well as the fabrication processes. Especially for the room-temperature operation of these systems, optical approaches have been mainly considered. In case of nanomechanical systems, the optical interferometry and optical knife-edge technique have been utilized to detect the nanomechanical motion at the flexural resonant mode. In these optical approaches, the displacement sensitivity is one of the key factors ensuring the operation of these mechanical systems. Especially, as the size of the device shrinks below the submicron region, the operation of the optical system is greatly influenced by the diffraction effect, and below the diffraction limit, the optical sensitivity degrades rapidly with the dimension of the device to be probed. At Applied NanoPhysics Lab, our research effort focuses on the development of the nanomechanical motion transduction techniques with high sensitivity and wide bandwidth to investigate the dynamics of mesoscopic systems and their applications.