As I planned yesterday (CRYO:1199), I tried out a new clamp using spare pieces of broken silicon instead of sapphire washers to sandwich the cantilever (as with the last run, I used the old, stiff rectangular block clamp---the newer cylindrical one is still in the cryostat).

I didn't take a photo, but this was basically just a sandwich consisting of the cantilever (still attached to the central wafer region) as the meat and two scrap broken-off cantilevers on each side as the bread. This was all put near the center of the steel block clamp so that the clamping force was normal, and I made sure that the protruding cantilever had enough room not to be clipped by the block as it swings.

I put it in the new chamber and pumped down, and immediately measured a fairly high Q of ~6800 (ringdown tau ~ 6.4 s, while the mode frequency is ~340 Hz---slightly higher than before due to the clamping being a bit further along the cantilever).

This is the highest room-temperature Q I've yet measured, beating the ~4300 I measured after we first installed the sapphire washers on the newer cylindrical clamp (see CRYO:1191), and is within a factor of 2 of Marie's prediction in the absence of clamping loss (also shown in that post). This is also by far the cleanest ringdown I've seen: there are a few high-frequency modes present when I first deliver the impulse, but they die away and do not return. The Q also seems far less amplitude-dependent than I've noticed before.