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Nanoscale materials have properties that frequently differ from those of their bulk form due to the scale effect, and therefore a measurement technique that can take account of such material characteristics with high accuracy and sensitivity is required. In the present study, advanced nanomechanical metrology was developed for evaluation of elastic properties of thin-film materials. A 52 nm thick chromium (Cr) film was deposited on a high-speed micromechanical resonator using an e-beam evaporator, and the structure was excited to resonate using an ultrasonic platform. The resonant frequencies for the first and second flexural vibration modes were measured using laser interferometry, and they were compared to analytical estimation from the classical beam theory. Results show that the experimental data are in excellent agreement with the theory, within 1% of the relative error, and a mass sensitivity up to 10.5 Hz/fg was achieved. Thus, the scale effect that reduced the Young’s modulus of Cr by 49.8% compared to its bulk property was correctly recognized by the proposed method.

The thermal conductivity of a nanoscale yttrium iron garnet (Y3Fe5O12, YIG) thin-film prepared by a sol-gel method was evaluated using the ultrafast pump-probe technique in the present study. The thermoreflectance change on the surface of a 250 nm thick YIG film, induced by the irradiation of femtosecond laser pulses, was measured, and curve fitting of a numerical solution for the transient heat conduction equation to the experimental data was performed using the finite difference method in order to extract the thermal property. Results show that the film’s thermal conductivity is 22–83% higher than the properties of bulk YIG materials prepared by different fabrication techniques, reflecting the microstructural characteristics and quality of the film.

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A method was developed to measure the first- and second-order vibration modes in a sandwich microcantilever beam oscillating in the megahertz frequency regime in the present study. Taking advantage of the ultrasonic frequency, a test platform was developed to induce free vibration of the microcantilever using a high-power radio frequency pulser that transmits tone burst signals to a contact transducer, and the resonant frequencies of the microcantilever were measured using a laser-optic interferometer. Results show that the microcantilever’s vibration above 8 MHz can be successfully detected, and its vibration modes were identified through a theoretical study based on the Euler–Bernoulli beam theory and a numerical analysis using the finite element method. The present study proposes a facile and effective way to actuate a high-speed sandwich microcantilever and detect its high-frequency response so that the technique can be employed to study the characteristics of micro- and nanomechanical sandwich structures and their properties.