No Arabic abstract
In this work we present a molecular dynamics simulation of a FFM experiment. The tip-sample interaction is studied by varying the normal force in the tip and the temperature of the surface. The friction force, cA, at zero load and the friction coefficient, $mu$, were obtained. Our results strongly support the idea that the effective contact area, A, decreases with increasing temperature and the friction coefficient presents a clear signature of the premelting process of the surface.
In this work we propose an extension to the analytical one-dimensional model proposed by E. Gnecco (Phys. Rev. Lett. 84:1172) to describe friction. Our model includes normal forces and the dependence with the angular direction of movement in which the object is dragged over a surface. The presence of the normal force in the model allow us to define judiciously the friction coefficient, instead of introducing it as an {sl a posteriori} concept. We compare the analytical results with molecular dynamics simulations. The simulated model corresponds to a tip sliding over a surface. The tip is simulated as a single particle interacting with a surface through a Lennard-Jones $(6-12)$ potential. The surface is considered as consisting of a regular BCC(001) arrangement of particles interacting with each other through a Lennard-Jones $(6-12)$ potential. We investigate the system under several conditions of velocity, temperature and normal forces. Our analytical results are in very good agreement with those obtained by the simulations and with experimental results from E. Riedo (Phys. Rev. Lett. 91:084502) and Eui-Sung Yoon (Wear 259:1424-1431) as well.
This paper is concerned with tuning friction and temperature in Langevin dynamics for fast sampling from the canonical ensemble. We show that near-optimal acceleration is achieved by choosing friction so that the local quadratic approximation of the Hamiltonian is a critical damped oscillator. The system is also over-heated and cooled down to its final temperature. The performances of different cooling schedules are analyzed as functions of total simulation time.
Curved fluid interfaces are investigated on the nanometre length scale by molecular dynamics simulation. Thereby, droplets surrounded by a metastable vapour phase are stabilized in the canonical ensemble. Analogous simulations are conducted for cylindrical menisci separating vapour and liquid phases under confinement in planar nanopores. Regarding the emergence of nanodroplets during nucleation, a non-equilibrium phenomenon, both the non-steady dynamics of condensation processes and stationary quantities related to supersaturated vapours are considered. Results for the truncated and shifted Lennard-Jones fluid and for mixtures of quadrupolar fluids confirm the applicability of the capillarity approximation and the classical nucleation theory.
The dynamic evolution at zero temperature of a uniform Ising ferromagnet on a square lattice is followed by Monte Carlo computer simulations. The system always eventually reaches a final, absorbing state, which sometimes coincides with a ground state (all spins parallel), and sometimes does not (parallel stripes of spins up and down). We initiate here the numerical study of ``Chaotic Time Dependence (CTD) by seeing how much information about the final state is predictable from the randomly generated quenched initial state. CTD was originally proposed to explain how nonequilibrium spin glasses could manifest equilibrium pure state structure, but in simpler systems such as homogeneous ferromagnets it is closely related to long-term predictability and our results suggest that CTD might indeed occur in the infinite volume limit.
Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is a powerful computational tool to study the behavior of macromolecular systems. But many simulations of this field are limited in spatial or temporal scale by the available computational resource. In recent years, graphics processing unit (GPU) provides unprecedented computational power for scientific applications. Many MD algorithms suit with the multithread nature of GPU. In this paper, MD algorithms for macromolecular systems that run entirely on GPU are presented. Compared to the MD simulation with free software GROMACS on a single CPU core, our codes achieve about 10 times speed-up on a single GPU. For validation, we have performed MD simulations of polymer crystallization on GPU, and the results observed perfectly agree with computations on CPU. Therefore, our single GPU codes have already provided an inexpensive alternative for macromolecular simulations on traditional CPU clusters and they can also be used as a basis to develop parallel GPU programs to further speedup the computations.