Controlling Stiction in Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems Using Liquid Crystals

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• 作者：Oleksandr Buchnev ; Nina Podoliak ; Thomas Frank ; Malgosia Kaczmarek ; Liudi Jiang ; Vassili A. Fedotov
• 刊名：ACS Nano
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：December 27, 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：10
• 期：12
• 页码：11519-11524
• 全文大小：436K
• ISSN：1936-086X

文摘

Stiction is one of the major reliability issues limiting practical application of nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS), an emerging device technology that exploits mechanical movements on the scale of an integrated electronic circuit. We report on a discovery that stiction can be eliminated by infiltrating NEMS with nematic liquid crystals. We demonstrate this experimentally using a NEMS-based tunable photonic metamaterial, where reliable switching of optical response was achieved for the entire range of nanoscopic structural displacements admitted by the metamaterial design. Being a more straightforward and easy-to-implement alternative to the existing antistiction solutions, our approach also introduces an active mechanism of stiction control, which enables toggling between stiction-free and the usual (stiction-limited) regimes of NEMS operation. It is expected to greatly expand the functionality of electro-mechanical devices and enable the development of adaptive and smart nanosystems.