High Quality Factor Suspended Nanochannel Resonator Devices, with Self-Oscillation Capacity

While the self-sustaining oscillating behavior has already been studied on piezoresistive readout nanomechanical NEMS devices, it has never been demonstrated so far on Suspended Nanochannel Resonator (SNR), a category of mass sensors that allows flow-through weighing of individual nanoparticles in liquid. Here we report a new SNR architecture that exhibits smaller footprint and a ten-fold improvement of the quality factor compared to the previous architecture. This improvement enabled us to experimentally demonstrate for the first time the ability of the new SNR sensor to self-oscillate without any external piezoceramic actuator.