| A micromechanical lever that deflects in response to the impacts of charged particles is proposed as a means of improving upon the capabilities of existing radiation detection technology. When a particle strikes an object, momentum is transferred to the impacted body. The resulting body motion can be correlated to the energy of the incident particle. The momentum detector offers promise as a highly discriminating, high-resolution tool for ion sensing.; Advances required to successfully realize a spectroscopic capability have been completed; specifically, techniques for reproducibly fabricating micromechanical structures have been optimized, and an instrument that measures miniscule deflections has been developed. Even absent substantial refinement efforts, the novel coupled-cavity optical detector can resolve lever motions on the order of 1--10 picometers.; A method by which the Brownian motion of the lever can be stilled has been proven which elicits reductions sufficient to measure heavy-ion impact, the deflections from which may be several orders of magnitude below the thermal vibration amplitude. Using active forcing techniques, the Brownian vibration of the microlevers has been reduced from room temperature (288 K) to sub-Kelvin temperatures, for levers vibrating in air. The mechanical factors that limit the noise reduction magnitude are discussed and methods of surmounting those limitations are identified. |
