Remote Sensing in Hybridized Arrays of Nanostrings

We study high-Q nanostrings that are joined end-to-end to form coupled linear arrays. Whereas isolated individual resonators exhibit sinusoidal vibrational modes with an almost perfectly harmonic spectrum, the modes of the interacting strings are substantially hybridized. Even far-separated strings can show significantly correlated displacement. This remote coupling property is exploited to quantify the deposition of femtogram-scale masses with string-by-string positional discrimination based on measurements of one string only.