Flexure-based nanomagnetic actuators and their ultimate scaling limits

Building upon prior work performed at the micrometer scale, nanometer-scale flexure-based ferromagnetic actuators have been designed, fabricated, and tested. The smallest fabricated and tested magnetic actuator is a cantilever-based ferromagnetic actuator that consists of a single 50x338x1500 nm³ nickel magnet and a 30x110x2200 nm³ gold cantilever beam. In addition, the ultimate scaling limits of actuators of this general design have also been carefully studied and presented. The targeted applications for these structures include magnetically tunable frequency-selective surfaces, tunable optical filters, and direct macro-to-nano 3-D manipulation performed in a wide variety of nanoscale environments.