Mass and stiffness calibration of nanowires using thermally driven vibration

Cantilevered or suspended nanowires show promise for force or mass sensing applications due to their small mass, high force sensitivity and high frequency bandwidth. To use these as quantitative sensors, their bending stiffness or mass must be calibrated experimentally, often using thermally driven vibration. However, this can be difficult because nanowires are slightly asymmetric, which results in two spatially orthogonal bending eigenmodes with closely spaced frequencies. This asymmetry presents problems for traditional stiffness calibration methods, which equate the measured thermal vibration spectrum near a resonance to that of a single eigenmode. Moreover, the principal axes may be arbitrarily rotated with respect to the measurement direction. In this work, the authors propose a method for calibrating the bending stiffness and mass of such nanowires' eigenmodes using a single measurement taken at an arbitrary orientation with respect to the principal axes.