Clamping and Q-Factor Improvement in a Carbon Nanotube Resonator

Abstract

This work reports the clamping effects on the performance of a carbon nanotube based nanoresonator. A direct comparison of two different nanotube-clamping geometries on the same nanotube device is presented. The nanotube was mechanically dry transferred and clamped through van-der-Waals forces onto palladium electrodes resulting in a bottom clamped configuration. A 20 nm platinum layer was then selectively deposited on the electrodes through atomic layer deposition resulting in top-bottom clamped configuration. With top clamping, a Q-factor increase of 1.5~2× has been observed accompanied by a decrease in the resonance frequency.