Experimental evidence of thermoelastic damping in silicon tuning fork

AbstractMiniaturized resonators are critical components in many application fields such as sensing, communication and time reference. One critical parameter for these resonators is their quality factor. In this study, various silicon tuning fork resonators with an AlN piezoelectric actuation have been fabricated. Depending on their resonance frequency, quality factors between 10'000 and 25'000 were obtained. It is shown that for frequencies between 30 and 80 kHz thermoelastic damping (TED) is the dominant mechanism that limits the Q-factor