Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

We request high-frequency electronics (two generators: one 50 GHz and one 20 GHz, a 23.6 GHz signal analyzer, two 600 MHz lock-in amplifiers). This equipment will support our long term objectives of understanding the interplay of mechanics and electronic in nanosystems, and are an essential portion of our 2014-2019 NSERC-Discovery proposal ""Quantum electro-mechanical engineering of nanosystems"". The requested apparatus will be heavily used by many graduate students and provide them with highly marketable skills in high-frequency electronics.This high-frequency equipment will enable time-resolve electron transport measurements, which will be combined with our current capabilities to strain-engineer electron transport in ultra-small (down to 10 nm-scale) suspended electro-mechanical systems (NEMS) of graphene, carbon nanotubes, and other materials such as silicon nanowires and MoS2. A first set of objectives is to explore the thermal conductivity of these one and two-dimensional materials: their dependence on defect-engineering (Si) and strain-engineering (graphene, MoS2, nanotubes), to test fundamental physics (deviations from Widemann-Franz, neutral modes of QHE), and applications (bolometry, thermopower). A second focus will be to study NEMS in the deep quantum regime: measure the back-action of electron transport on the quantum mechanical state of an oscillator, the strain dependence of electron-vibron couplings, and develop widely frequency tunable and sensitive 10-nm-scale NEMS sensors.