No Arabic abstract
Lubricants are widely used in macroscopic mechanical systems to reduce friction and wear. However, on the microscopic scale, it is not clear to what extent lubricants are beneficial. Therefore, in this study, we consider two diamond solid-state gears at the nanoscale immersed in different lubricant molecules and perform classical MD simulations to investigate the rotational transmission of motion. We find that lubricants can help to synchronize the rotational transmission between gears regardless of the molecular species and the center-of-mass distance. Moreover, the influence of the angular velocity of the driving gear is investigated and shown to be related to the bond formation process between gears.
The tribology of a bubble rubbing on a solid surface is studied via interferometry. A unique experimental setup is designed for monitoring the thickness profiles of a wetting film, intercalated between the bubble and hydrophilic glass moving with speed up to 412 um/s. The determination of the 3D film thickness profiles allows us to calculate 3D maps over the wetted surface of the local capillary, disjoining and lift pressures, viscous stress and friction force. In this way the average friction force and the corresponding friction coefficient are obtained. A theoretical model for the dependence of the friction coefficient on the film thickness is developed. The relevant slip coefficient, being a measure for the slip between liquid and solid, is determined as a function of the speed of the solid surface. It is found out that below 170 um/s a friction regime exists which formally resembles dry friction, while at larger speed the friction force between the bubble and solid passes through a maximum. Furthermore, the friction coefficient has a large value at low speed of the solid and reduces substantially with the speed increase.
Solid state qubits from paramagnetic point defects in solids are promising platforms to realize quantum networks and novel nanoscale sensors. Recent advances in materials engineering make possible to create proximate qubits in solids that might interact with each other, leading to electron spin/charge fluctuation. Here we develop a method to calculate the tunneling-mediated charge diffusion between point defects from first principles, and apply it to nitrogen-vacancy (NV) qubits in diamond. The calculated tunneling rates are in quantitative agreement with previous experimental data. Our results suggest that proximate neutral and negatively charged NV defect pairs can form an NV--NV molecule. A tunneling-mediated model for the source of decoherence of the near-surface NV qubits is developed based on our findings on the interacting qubits in diamond.
The development of spin qubits for quantum technologies requires their protection from the main source of finite-temperature decoherence: atomic vibrations. Here we eliminate one of the main barriers to the progress in this field by providing a complete first-principles picture of spin relaxation that includes up to two-phonon processes. Our method is based on machine learning and electronic structure theory and makes the prediction of spin lifetime in realistic systems feasible. We study a prototypical vanadium-based molecular qubit and reveal that the spin lifetime at high temperature is limited by Raman processes due to a small number of THz intra-molecular vibrations. These findings effectively change the conventional understanding of spin relaxation in this class of materials and open new avenues for the rational design of long-living spin systems.
We consider the nonlinear terahertz response of n-doped monolayer graphene at room temperature using a microscopic theory of carrier dynamics. Our tight-binding model treats the carrier-field interaction in the length gauge, includes phonon as well as short-range neutral-impurity scattering, and fully accounts for the intrinsic nonlinear response of graphene near the Dirac point. Treating each interaction microscopically allows us to separate contributions from current clipping, phonon creation, and elastic impurity scattering. Although neutral impurity scattering and phonon scattering are both highly energy-dependent, we find that they impact conduction-band electron dynamics very differently, and that together they can help explain experimental results concerning field-dependent terahertz transmission through graphene.
We demonstrate that efficient optical pumping of nuclear spins in semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) can be achieved by resonant pumping of optically forbidden transitions. This process corresponds to one-to-one conversion of a photon absorbed by the dot into a polarized nuclear spin, which also has potential for initialization of hole spin in QDs. Pumping via the forbidden transition is a manifestation of the optical solid effect, an optical analogue of the effect previously observed in electron spin resonance experiments in the solid state. We find that by employing this effect, nuclear polarization of 65% can be achieved, the highest reported so far in optical orientation studies in QDs. The efficiency of the spin pumping exceeds that employing the allowed transition, which saturates due to the low probability of electron-nuclear spin flip-flop.