Nanomechanics

News and Updates

Quantum Thermometer or Optical Refrigerator?

June 22, 2017

In an arranged marriage of optics and mechanics, physicists have created microscopic structural beams that have a variety of powerful uses when light strikes

schematic of laser light interacting with a plasmonic gap resonator

NIST Device for Detecting Subatomic-Scale Motion Has Potential Robotics, Homeland Security Applications

December 15, 2016

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new device that measures the motion of super-tiny particles traversing

NIST Unveils Forensic Technique to Measure Mechanical Properties of Evidence

November 1, 2016

You may have seen it on CSI: The star examines hair from a crime scene and concludes its color or texture looks like the defendant’s hair, or maybe his dog’s

Projects and Programs

Designing the Nanoworld: Nanostructure, Nanodevices, and Nano-optics

Nano and atomic scale theory of the electronic, optical and mechanical properties of ultrasmall structures, such as semiconductor quantum dots and dopants in Si

Video microscopic image - Rotation and translation.

Control of Magnetic Nanoparticles for Nanoscale Manipulation of Fluids and Materials (Archived)

Scientists and engineers currently have a growing library of synthetic microscale and nanoscale swimmers which affect the hydrodynamics of their surroundings in

The SPMforAMP project develops novel SPM methods

Scanning Probe Microscopy for Advanced Materials and Processes

Local material-property information is essential to evaluate emerging micro- and nanoscale materials, which many manufacturers would like to leverage for their

Scanning Probe Microscopy Measurement and Standards

This project is tasked with enabling accurate nanomechanical property measurements on materials. Our goal is to develop standard reference materials and

Publications

High-throughput bend-strengths of ultra-small polysilicon MEMS components

May 17, 2021

Author(s)

Robert Cook, Brad Boyce, Lawrence Friedman, Frank DelRio

The strength distribution of polysilicon bend specimens, approximately 10 um in size, is measured using a high-throughput microelectromechanical system

A system for probing Casimir energy corrections to the condensation energy

December 28, 2020

Author(s)

Diego J. Perez, Alexander Stange, Richard Lally, Lawrence Barrett, Matthias Imboden, Abhishek Som, David Campbell, Vladimir Aksyuk, David Bishop

In this article, we present a nano-electromechanical system (NEMS) designed to detect changes in the Casimir Energy. The Casimir effect is a result of the

Kirigami engineering - Nanoscale structures exhibiting a range of controllable 3D configurations

December 22, 2020

Author(s)

Xu Zhang, Lior Medina, Haogang Cai, Vladimir Aksyuk, Horacio Espinosa, Omar D. Lopez

Kirigami structures provide a promising approach to transform flat films with patterns of cuts into 3D complex structures that are difficult to achieve by

Snakeskin-inspired Elastomers with Extremely Low Coefficient of Friction under Dry Conditions

December 11, 2020

Author(s)

Mengyuan Wang, Sujan Ghosh, Christopher M. Stafford, Adrienne K. Blevins, Sijia Huang, Jaylene Martinez, Rong Long, Christopher N. Bowman, Jason P. Killgore, Min Zou, Yifu Ding