Invited Article: Scalable high-sensitivity optomechanical magnetometers on a chip

Abstract

The dual-resonant enhancement of mechanical and optical response in cavity optomechanical magnetometers enables precision sensing of magnetic fields. In previous working prototypes of such magnetometers, a cavity optomechanical system is functionalized by manually epoxy-bonding a grain of magnetostrictive material. While this approach allows proof-of-principle demonstrations, practical applications require more scalable and reproducible fabrication pathways. In this work, we developed a multiple-step method to scalably fabricate optomechanical magnetometers on a silicon chip, with reproducible performance across different devices. The key step is to develop a process to sputter coat a magnetostrictive film onto high quality toroidal microresonators, without degradation of the optical quality factor. A peak sensitivity of 585 pT/Hz is achieved, which is comparable with previously reported results using epoxy-bonding. Furthermore, we demonstrate that thermally annealing the sputtered film can improve the magnetometer sensitivity by a factor of 6.3.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2018
Source ID
10.1063/1.5055029

Entities

People

  • Ali Dehghan-manshadi
  • Bei-Bei Li
  • Douglas Bulla
  • Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop
  • Scott Foster
  • Stefan Forstner
  • Varun Prakash
  • Warwick P. Bowen

Organizations

  • Australian Research Council
  • Defence Science and Technology Group
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • University of Queensland

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Nanocomposite Materials Science
  • Optical Physics and Photonics.
  • Thin Film Deposition Science.