Study on the generalized thermoelastic vibration of the optically excited semiconducting microcantilevers

In this paper, the theory of coupled plasma, thermal and elastic wave was used to study the vibration of semiconducting microcantilevers during photothermal process. The generalized thermoelastic model was adopted, along with plasma wave model, to obtain the vibration response of semiconducting microcantilevers under periodical laser excitation. The influence of thermal relaxation time on the vibration was investigated. The conventional and generalized thermoelastic theories for the temperature and deflection of microcantilever were compared. The simulation results for the amplitude and phase versus the modulation frequency revealed that near resonance frequency the generalized hyperbolic thermoelastic model was more suitable to describe the vibration characterization of microcantilevers than the conventional thermoelstic model. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.