Design and fabrication of arrays of nanoelectromechanical resonators for parallel detection of biomolecular interactions

The recent achievements of surface and bulk micro and nanomachining techniques combined with the fabrication techniques of integrated circuits have led to the development of miniaturized sensors and actuators exhibiting unprecedented sensitivity. This work is dedicated to the design and fabrication of nanoelectromechanical resonators for parallel detection of biomolecular interactions. The aim is to obtain piezoresistive nanoresonators with a high mechanical quality factor and a high force sensitivity to detect the mass loading induced by specific biomolecular interactions (ligand-receptor, antibody-antigen, hybridization of complementary DNA strands).