Over the past twenty years, the science and engineering of nanomechanical systems (NEMS) has developed into a quite extended and rapidly growing area of research. The first examples of such mechanical systems, advanced by the application of semiconductor lithographic techniques to the fabrication of mechanically active devices, included cantilevers where the application of a force as small as a few piconewtons would cause measurable displacements, and structures fabricated with size scales such that the fundamental mechanical mode was in the 100 MHz band. Extensive efforts exploring different materials and methods to support these structures has supported the advent of very high quality factor mechanical resonators with frequencies ranging from the MHz band well into the GHz band of frequencies. This has allowed the development of nanomechanical resonators as time-keeping systems competitive with macroscale quartz crystals; as radiofrequency filters for the cellphone industry; and increasingly as systems with strong potential for fundamental experiments in quantum mechanics as well as applications to quantum information technology. Nanomechanical systems also are playing an increasingly important and central role as ultrasensitive detectors of mass, displacement, acceleration, force or spin. The applications that have become possible include measurements of forces between individual biomolecules, forces originating in the magnetic resonant response of single electron and nuclear spins, and noise that arises from mass fluctuations involving single molecules. As a result, this area of research attracts a large number of researchers from around the world. By their nature, nanomechanical systems are interdisciplinary, since they can couple to electrical circuits or optical cavities and they have potential applications in sensing, telecommunications, biophysics, and photonics, topics which are studied not only in condensed matter but also in the applied physics.

The recent integration of techniques to trap and strongly focus electromagnetic fields together with nanomechanical degrees of freedom, through the integration of high quality factor optical and microwave cavities with a high quality factor mechanical degree of freedom, has created an entire subfield that is expanding very rapidly, termed cavity optomechanics. Structures in which a version of a Fabry-Perot optical cavity is fabricated in a way that one of the two Fabry-Perot mirrors is mechanically active, or cavities where the two mirrors are fixed but a low-loss dielectric membrane is placed in a high field region of the cavity, have generated a number of very interesting physics results, including mechanically-induced transparency, sideband cooling of the mechanical mode, sideband amplification of the mechanical motion, and other effects intimately tied to the nonlinear parametric response of these systems. The use of cavity optomechanical systems for the control and readout of nanomechanical systems has progressed to where now quantum mechanical effects are beginning to be seen in mechanical systems, although the first demonstration of operating a mechanical system in the quantum ground state, and also quantum control of that system, was first done using a piezoelectrically-based approach rather than one based on optomechanics. The advent of cavity optomechanics has also provided points of contact between nanomechanics and areas such as atomic physics and nonlinear optics.

Nanomechanical systems fabricated from a variety of materials have been explored in the course of this development, including the use of single-crystal semiconductors such as silicon and gallium arsenide; insulating materials such as amorphous silicon dioxide, silicon nitride and aluminum nitride; and metals including aluminum and niobium. These materials display specific properties that are useful for different applications, including superconductivity at low temperatures for some metals; good optical properties, especially for the silicon-based materials; and strong piezoelectric response for materials such as aluminum nitride and gallium arsenide.

The geometric structures explored, initially restricted to cantilevered and doubly-clamped beams, now include metal dome resonators; whispering gallery resonators; resonators based on defects in phononic and photonic crystals; and bulk dilatational and edge mode structures. The designs have evolved to include designs to minimize radiative acoustic loss and maximize interactions between the mechanical motion and electrical or electromagnetic (optical) fields, as well as ones that allow integration of quantum systems to detect or control the mechanical motion, or alternatively to generate responses in the mechanical system indicative of the state of the quantum system.

The registration fee for the workshop is 200 USD (100 USD for students).