Enhancing the Performance of Sintered Fused Silica Cylindrical Shell Resonators Through Wet Etching

This letter presents the fabrication, characterization, and testing of cylindrical shell resonators (CSRs) manufactured using a printable polymer–glass mixture (Glassomer) and replication molding. We first manufactured three 9.6-mm-diameter fused silica-based CSRs with a thickness of 0.6 mm. After performing wet etching of fully sintered glass devices, the shell thickness of each resonator was reduced to ∼0.3 mm. For one of the etched devices, we observed between three to four times improvements in quality factor, approximately seven times increase in time constant values, and two to eight times reduction in frequency split for N = 2 and N = 3 resonance modes. Moreover, the enhancement of surface roughness (∼340 to ∼156 nm) and reduction in shell thickness show a direct relationship with improvements in device performance.