Quality Factors and Energy Losses of Single-Crystal Silicon Nanowire Electromechanical Resonators

We report measurements on quality factors (Q's) of single-crystal silicon nanowire (SiNW) resonators operating in the very-high frequency (VHF) range. Q's of ~200 MHz metalized SiNWs are considerably lower than those of the pristine SiNWs operating at similar frequencies. The observed damping effect due to resonance transduction agrees well with the loaded-Q model for magnetomotive scheme. The temperature dependency of dissipation (Q <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-1</sup> ) is found to be approximately from Q <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-1</sup> ∝T <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0.3</sup> to Q <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-1</sup> ∝T <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0.4</sup> . Clamping losses are becoming important for such VHF ultrasmall resonators.