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Sub-terahertz electromechanics

Nature Electronics volume 6, pages 301–306 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Electromechanical resonators operating in the sub-terahertz regime could be of use in the development of future communication systems because they support extremely fast data rates. Such resonators are also of interest in studying quantum phenomena of mechanical entities, as they can maintain the quantum ground state at kelvin temperatures rather than the millikelvin temperatures demanded by gigahertz resonators. Here we report microelectromechanical resonators operating beyond 100 GHz. By incorporating a millimetre-wave dual-rail resonator into a thickness-shear-mode micromechanical system, we achieve efficient electromechanical transduction through enhanced on-chip impedance matching, which is key to revealing the infinitesimal displacements of these sub-terahertz mechanical modes. Our devices are based on commercially available z-cut lithium niobate thin films and patterned using standard semiconductor fabrication processes.

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Fig. 1: DRCTR.
Fig. 2: Sub-THz electromechanics.
Fig. 3: DRR-enhanced electromechanics and figure-of-merit extraction.
Fig. 4: Thickness and orientation variations.

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The data that support the findings of this study are included in this Article. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Army Research Office through grant W911NF-18-1-0020 (H.X.T., M.S., Y.X. and W.F.). H.X.T. acknowledges support from the NSF Center for Quantum Networks under grant no. EEC-1941583 and Department of Energy (DOE) Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA) through grant no. DE-SC0012704. J.X. acknowledges support from NSF under grant no. EFMA-1640959. Funding for materials used for this study is partially provided by the DOE (DE-SC0019406). We thank M. Xu for fruitful discussions. We thank Y. Sun, S. Rinehart, K. Woods and M. Rooks for the assistance in the device fabrication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jiacheng Xie, Mohan Shen, Yuntao Xu, Wei Fu, Likai Yang & Hong X. Tang

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  1. Jiacheng Xie
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  2. Mohan Shen
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  3. Yuntao Xu
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  4. Wei Fu
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Contributions

H.X.T. and J.X. conceived the idea. J.X. designed the devices and experiments under the guidance of H.X.T. J.X. fabricated the devices with contributions from M.S., Y.X., W.F. and L.Y. J.X. performed the experiment, processed the data and provided the theoretical analysis. J.X. and H.X.T. wrote the manuscript with input from all the authors. H.X.T. supervised the project.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hong X. Tang.

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Nature Electronics thanks Zhenyun Qian for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary sections I–V, figs. 1–11, tables 1–6 and references.

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Xie, J., Shen, M., Xu, Y. et al. Sub-terahertz electromechanics. Nat Electron 6, 301–306 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-023-00942-y

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