Large-scale parallelization of nanomechanical mass spectrometry with weakly-coupled resonators
Abstract
Nanomechanical mass spectrometry is a recent technological breakthrough that enables the real-time analysis of single molecules. In contraposition to its extreme mass sensitivity is a limited capture cross-section that can hinder measurements in a practical setting. Here we show that weak-coupling between devices in resonator arrays can be used in nanomechanical mass spectrometry to parallelize the measurement. This coupling gives rise to asymmetric amplitude peaks in the vibrational response of a single nanomechanical resonator of the array, which coincide with the natural frequencies of all other resonators in the same array. A rigorous theoretical model is derived that explains the physical mechanisms and describes the practical features of this parallelization. We demonstrate the significance of this parallelization through inertial imaging of analytes adsorbed to all resonators of an array, with the possibility of simultaneously detecting resonators placed at distances a hundred times larger than their own physical size.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
The work was partially supported by Regione Piemonte through European Funds for Regional Development (FOOD DIGITAL MONITORING project) and with the support of the CleanWaterCenter@PoliTo. The authors also acknowledge support from the Australian Research Council Grants scheme, and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science (CE170100026). C.R. expresses his gratitude to Prof. Guillermo Villanueva and Prof. Lamberto Rondoni for the fruitful discussions.
Contributions
S.S. and C.R. designed the experiment. S.S., C.R. and J.E.S. analyzed the data and wrote the paper. K.B. and A.C. performed the FIB deposition and the electron microscopy characterization. J.E.S. developed the theoretical model and performed the calculations. D.C. developed and conducted the FE simulations. S.S. and G.D.L. carried out the vibrational measurements and processed the data. All authors discussed the results and commented on the paper.
Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no competing interests.
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC6733932
- Regione Piemonte
- Australian Research Council
- CE170100026