Engineering Commons^™

The Stochastic Dynamics Of Tethered Microcantilevers In A Viscous Fluid, Brian A. Robbins, Milad Radiom, William A. Ducker, John Y. Walz, Mark R. Paul

Chemical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

We explore and quantify the coupled dynamics of a pair of micron scale cantilevers immersed in a viscous fluid that are also directly tethered to one another at their tips by a spring force. The spring force, for example, could represent the molecular stiffness or elasticity of a biomolecule or material tethered between the cantilevers. We use deterministic numerical simulations with the fluctuation-dissipation theorem to compute the stochastic dynamics of the cantilever pair for the conditions of experiment when driven only by Brownian motion. We validate our approach by comparing directly with experimental measurements in the absence of the tether …