A method to investigate the temporal spectral response of microresonators affected by optical read-out techniques

In various applications of nano- or microresonators optical read-out techniques are frequently used owing to their excellent sensitivity. However, absorption of the incident light beam in the resonator material causes thermal heating and as a matter of fact an erroneous shift of the measured resonant frequency. We propose a new method for time resolved frequency response measurements to identify this thermomechanical effect and to extract almost undisturbed resonant spectra. This method was implemented in a conventional beam deflection set-up and its suitability was proven investigating membrane based columnar hybrid microresonators for different powers of the probing light beam. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.