Experimental Nanostructures

Abstract

In this chapter we turn from a theoretical description of solid mechanics to a description of experimental nanostructures, built to investigate various mechanical properties and applications of nanomechanical devices. The structures that we have chosen to describe here were almost all fabricated using semiconductor processing techniques, developed for integrated circuit fabrication, as this is the most straightforward and controllable method for fabricating mechanical structures at the submicron scale. There are many references in this chapter to particular techniques for fabricating the structures; we have devoted two chapters, following this one, to the detailed description of a number of semiconductor processing techniques and how they can be applied to nanostructure fabrication.