"The new approach is simple in principle. Their device consists of a thin membrane of silicon nitride coated with a mirror-like layer of aluminium. This nanomembrane is suspended above an electrode forming a capacitor which is itself part of a standard LC-circuit that picks up radio waves at its resonant frequency.
When this happens, the resonating circuit causes the nanomembrane to vibrate.
The trick that Bagci and co have pulled off is to bounce a laser beam off the nanomembrane causing an optical phase shift that they then measure using standard optical techniques."
"The numbers are impressive. The new device has a room temperature sensitivity of 5 picoVolts per (Hz)^1/2 at a frequency of 1 Mhz. In other words, it does the same job at room temperature that physicists could only dream of doing at the temperature of liquid helium."
Mikek