We report measurements of noncontact friction between surfaces of NbSe$_{2}$ and SrTiO$_{3}$, and a sharp Pt-Ir tip that is oscillated laterally by a quartz tuning fork cantilever. At 4.2 K, the friction coefficients on both the metallic and insulating materials show a giant maximum at the tip-surface distance of several nanometers. The maximum is strongly correlated with an increase in the spring constant of the cantilever. These features can be understood phenomenologically by a distance-dependent relaxation mechanism with distributed time scales.
Tribology, which studies surfaces in contact and relative motion, includes friction, wear, and lubrication, straddling across different fields: mechanical engineering, materials science, chemistry, nanoscience, physics. This short review restricts to the last two disciplines, with a qualitative survey of a small number of recent progress areas in the physics of nanofriction.
The noncontact (van der Waals) friction is an interesting physical effect which has been the subject of controversial scientific discussion. The direct friction term due to the thermal fluctuations of the electromagnetic field leads to a friction force proportional to 1/Z^5 where Z is the atom-wall distance). The backaction friction term takes into account the feedback of thermal fluctuations of the atomic dipole moment onto the motion of the atom and scales as 1/Z^8. We investigate noncontact friction effects for the interactions of hydrogen, ground-state helium and metastable helium atoms with alpha-quartz (SiO_2), gold (Au) and calcium difluorite (CaF_2). We find that the backaction term dominates over the direct term induced by the thermal electromagnetic fluctuations inside the material, over wide distance ranges. The friction coefficients obtained for gold are smaller than those for SiO_2 and CaF_2 by several orders of magnitude.
Traditional laws of friction believe that the friction coefficient of two specific solids takes constant value. However, molecular simulations revealed that the friction coefficient of nanosized asperity depends strongly on contact size and asperity radius. Since contacting surfaces are always rough consisting of asperities varying dramatically in geometric size, a theoretical model is developed to predict the friction behavior of fractal rough surfaces in this work. The result of atomic-scale simulations of sphere-on-flat friction is summarized into a uniform expression. Then, the size dependent feature of friction at nanoscale is incorporated into the analysis of fractal rough surfaces. The obtained results display the dependence of friction coefficient on roughness, material properties and load. It is revealed that the friction coefficient decreases with increasing contact area or external load. This model gives a theoretical guideline for the prediction of friction coefficient and the design of friction pairs.
AgF2 is a layered material and a correlated charge transfer insulator with an electronic structure very similar to the parent compounds of cuprate high-Tc superconductors. It is also interesting for being a powerful oxidizer. Here we present a first principles computation of its electronic properties in a slab geometry including its work function for the (010) surface (7.76 eV) which appears to be one of the highest among known materials surpassing even that of fluorinated diamond (7.24 eV). We demonstrate that AgF2 will show a broken-gap type alignment becoming electron doped and promoting injection of holes in many wide band gap insulators if chemical reaction can be avoided. Novel junction devices involving p type and n type superconductors are proposed. The issue of chemical reaction is discussed in connection with the possibility to create flat AgF2 monolayers achieving high-Tc superconductivity. As a first step in this direction, we study the stability and properties of an isolated AgF2 monolayer.
We report direction dependent luminescence (DDL), i.e., the asymmetry in the luminescence intensity between the opposite directions of the emission, in multiferroic CuB2O4. Although it is well known that the optical constants can change with the reversal of the propagation direction of light in multiferroic materials, the largest asymmetry in the luminescence intensity was 0.5 % so far. We have performed a measurement of photoluminescence with a He-Ne laser irradiation (633 nm). The luminescence intensity changes by about 70 % with the reversal of the magnetic field due to the interference between the electric dipole and magnetic dipole transitions. We also demonstrate the imaging of the canted antiferromagnetic domain structure of (Cu,Ni)B2O4 by using the large DDL.