Thermomechanical transitions in doubly-clamped micro-oscillators

The small size and low damping of MEMS oscillators give rise to phenomena that are not observed routinely at the macroscopic scale. In this work we document and explain an experimentally observed transition in the response of a doubly clamped micromechanical oscillator with pretension. The transition from softening to hardening is repeatedly observed upon increasing the power of an incident sensing laser beam, a procedure routinely used to improve signal strength during optical detection of resonant motion of microstructures. At intermediate laser power, a novel resonant response that displays characteristics of both softening and hardening in the same sweep, is observed experimentally. Increased laser heating of a structure in tension may be expected to increase softening behavior. Using tools from non-linear dynamics and continuum mechanics, we show that the observed counter-intuitive behavior can be explained by a competition between the opposing responses of linear and non-linear stiffnesses to a change in temperature.