Sensitivity Limits of Nanomechanical Resonance Spectroscopy

The sensitivity limit of the recently proposed chemical sensing method, nanomechanical resonance spectroscopy (NRS) \footnote{P.A. Greaney and J.C. Grossman, \emph{Nano Letters}, {\bf 8}, 2648-2652, (2008).}, is investigated using classical molecular dynamics simulations. The NRS method exploits the preferential transfer of energy between resonant modes, using an array of nanomechanical resonators to interrogate the vibrational spectrum of an analyte directly. We report on the effects of solvent and complex analytes.