Observation of locked intrinsic localized vibrational modes in a micromechanical oscillator array

Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Jan 31;90(4):044102. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.044102. Epub 2003 Jan 30.

Abstract

The nonlinear vibrational properties of a periodic micromechanical oscillator array have been measured. For sufficiently large amplitude of the driver, the optic mode of the di-element cantilever array becomes unstable and breaks up into excitations ranging over only a few cells. A driver-induced locking effect is observed to eternalize some of these intrinsic localized modes so that their amplitudes become fixed and the modes become spatially pinned.