Influence of Clamping Loss and Electrical Damping On Nonlinear Dissipation in Micromechanical Resonators

We study the influence of clamping loss, electrical damping, and transduction nonlinearity on the measured nonlinear dissipation in encapsulated microme-chanical wheel resonators. Our measurements suggest that nonlinear dissipation may arise from the same phonon scattering origins as thermoelastic dissipation in flexural mode resonators ranging in size from carbon nanotubes to guitar strings. These results point to future investigations of thermal bath engineering to probe the origins of nonlinear dissipation in micro- and nanomechanical resonators.