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Thin silicon nitride nanomembranes are attracting growing attention following a novel fabrication method which consists in patterning them with a phononic crystal. In engineering the vibrational mode profile, the dominant mechanisms of loss, radiation loss and intrinsic material loss, are simultaneously addressed and mitigated. The fabrication method employed by the optomechanics group at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel is here presented, only employing basic lithography techniques and wet etching processes.

This is a method to improve the quality of lithography - in particular electron beam lithography (EBL). During an EBL exposure the electrons undergo different scattering processes. One scattering process that plays an important role is the back scattering of the electrons from the substrate or different stacks of thin film present in the exposure stack. As a result the actual dose that the resist sees is quite different that the original exposure dose. This ...

We describe the fabrication of high-stress Si_3N_4 nanobeam resonators with high aspect ratios exceeding lengths of 3.5mm. The lowest order out-of-plane modes of these nanobeams have quality factors of Q\geq 10^6 with fundamental mode frequencies lying in the range of 80-500kHz. The beams are fabricated from high-stress, 20-50nm-thick films of Si_3N_4 deposited via LPCVD on standard silicon wafers. The beams are patterned via electron beam lithography and deep reactive ion etching. The underlying silicon is ...

Alumina (\mathrm{Al_2O_3}) films are widely used in photonics and superconducting circuits as an etch stop or passivation layer. In silicon nitride (\mathrm{Si_3N_4}) fabrication, a widely used etching recipe is dry etching using a mixture of \mathrm{SF_6/CHF_3} gasses. In case of multi-stacked materials, one might be interested to etch the \mathrm{Si_3N_4} layer with an stop layer to protect the rest of the stack from the etching step. \mathrm{Al_2O_3} is a great etch stop layer for \mathrm{Si_3N_4} ...

Releasing mechanical structures is a fundamental step in MEMS processing. Given the wide usage of silicon nitride ( \mathrm{Si_3N_4} ) on silicon (Si) carrier due to high stress and high mechanical Q factors, high etching selectivity between \mathrm{Si_3N_4} and Si is very crucial for the release process. Here we demonstrate that UV light from ambient light sources in a cleanroom environment (EPFL - CMi) can increase the etch rate of \mathrm{Si_3N_4} ...