Quasicrystal Architected Nanomechanical Resonators via Data-Driven Design

arXiv:2604.07379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: From butterfly wings to remnants of nuclear detonation, aperiodic order repeatedly emerges in nature, often exhibiting reduced sensitivity to boundaries and symmetry constraints. Inspired by this principle, a paradigm shift is introduced in nanomechanical resonator design from periodic to aperiodic structures, focusing on a special class: quasicrystals (QCs). Although soft clamping enabled by phononic stopbands has become a central strategy for achieving high-Q_m nanomechanical resonators, its practical realization has been largely confined to periodic phononic crystals, where band structure engineering is well established. The potential of aperiodic architectures, however, has remained largely unexplored, owing to their intrinsic complexity and the lack of systematic approaches to identifying and exploiting stopband behavior. Here we demonstrate that soft clamping can be realized in quasicrystal architectures and that high-Q_m nanomechanical resonators can be systematically predicted through a data-driven design framework. As a representative demonstration, the 12-fold QC-based resonator obtained numerically a quality factor Q_m sim 10^7 and an effective mass of sub-nanograms at MHz frequencies, corresponding to an exceptional force sensitivity of 26.4~aN/sqrt{ext{Hz}} compared to previous 2D phononic crystals. These results establish QCs as a robust platform for next-generation nanomechanical resonators and open a new design regime beyond periodic order.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-10-14