Evaluation of 3C-SiC nanomechanical resonators using room temperature magnetomotive transduction

We report our efforts toward using room temperature magnetomotive transduction technique for SiC nanomechanical resonators. The resonators were nanomachined from 30 nm-thick 3C-SiC thin films epitaxially grown on (100) silicon. The structures show mechanical resonance at 10.41 MHz with a quality factor of about 2800. Magnetomotive transduction was used to read out the resonance at room temperature and moderate pressure. This technique has the potential to become an important tool for studying the properties of ultrathin films, as well as developing deployable SiC-based NEMS prototype devices and systems for applications that would benefit from SiC as the structural material.