Controllable bending stiffness and damping has significant applications in soft robotics, especially for soft slender manipulator arms inspired by octopus tentacles. The bending moment on a solid slender beam is balanced by the sum of moments generated by internal stresses. Resulting stresses are not controllable and decided by the bending curvature, area moment of inertia and elastic modulus o...

We have developed a technique for photothermal displacement spectroscopy that is potentially orders of magnitude more sensitive than conventional methods. We use a single Fabry-Perot resonator to enhance both the intensity of the pump beam and the sensitivity of the probe beam. The result is an enhancement of the response of the instrument by a factor proportional to the square of the finesse o...

Micromachined thermal multimorph actuators for out-of-plane displacements have been designed and fabricated by Multi-Users MEMS Process (MUMPs) with a post-processing bulk etching step. Micromachined actuators have potential applications in micromanipulation and nanoposition such as manipulation of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tips, nanopositioner for nano-assembly, micro/nanorobots and ...

TEM specimens of a LaAlO(3)/SrTiO(3) multilayer are prepared by FIB with internal lift out. Using a Ga(+1) beam of 5 kV, a final cleaning step yielding top, top-angle, side, and bottom-angle cleaning is performed. Different cleaning procedures, which can be easily implemented in a dual beam FIB system, are described and compared; all cleaning types produce thin lamellae, useful for HRTEM and HA...

Micrometer-sized reflection holograms can be written into a rapidly rotating homogeneous photopolymer disk at the focus of a high-numerical-aperture beam and its retroreflection to implement high-capacity multilayer digital data storage. This retroreflection is generated by an optical system with positive unity magnification to ensure passive alignment of the counterpropagating beam. Analysis r...

We report on a novel microfabrication method to fabricate aluminum nitride (AlN) piezoelectric microstructures down to 2 microns size by a surface micromachining process. Highly c-axis oriented AlN thin films are deposited between thin Cr electrodes on polysilicon structural layers by rf reactive sputtering. The top Cr layer is used both as a mask to etch the AlN thin films and as an electrode ...

We report grazing incidence X-ray scattering and high angle X-ray diffraction measurements of the structure of sputtered Cu/Co multilayers. Compared with structures grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) the roughness at the Cu/Co interfaces has little conformality and is almost uncorrelated between the bottom and the top. The lateral correlation length is short in comparison with the MBE materi...

The goal of this project was to demonstrate a simple method to measure absorption loss in thin dielectrics films, in particular in multilayer coatings for high power lasers in which very low absorption losses are required. The absorption characterization method is a photo-thermal technique based on thermal lensing. The method measures the defocusing of an incident probe beam caused by a thermal...

The development of new materials requires an understanding of their mode of growth and the nature of defects, interfaces and strains thereby incorporated. This paper shows how convergent beam electron diffraction (CBED) and large angle CBED (LACBED) can be used to analyse such problems. It is shown how CBED and LACBED can give two-beam rocking curves, which can be used to profile plane rotation...

Two-dimensional black phosphorus is a new material that has gained widespread interest as an active material for optoelectronic applications. It features high carrier mobility that allows for efficient free-carrier absorption of terahertz radiation, even though the photon energy is far below the bandgap energy. Here we present an efficient and ultrafast terahertz detector, based on exfoliated m...