Graphene nanomechanical vibrations measured with a phase-coherent software-defined radio

Abstract Software-defined radios (SDRs) are radio frequency transceivers designed to facilitate digital signal processing through the use of vast libraries of open-source software. Here, we assemble a simple data acquisition system whose architecture, based on SDR, allows us to develop a comprehensive suite of tools to study the vibrations of a few-layer graphene nanomechanical resonator. Namely, we measure the cross-spectrum of vibrations in the frequency domain, we measure their energy decay rate in the time domain, we perform vector measurements of their in-phase and quadrature components, and we control their phase using a time-dependent strain field –all with a single measurement platform. Our approach allows us to tailor our experiments at will and gives us control over every stage of data processing. Overall, our versatile system enables measuring a wide range of nanomechanical properties of graphene by customizing the signal acquisition and replacing some analog electrical circuits, such as filters, mixers, and demodulators, by blocks of code.