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Graphite superlubricity enabled by triboinduced nanocontacts

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 Added by Renato Buzio
 Publication date 2021
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




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Colloidal probe Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) allows to explore sliding states of vanishing friction, i.e. superlubricity, in mesoscopic graphite contacts. In this respect, superlubricity is known to appear upon formation of a triboinduced transfer layer, originated by material transfer of graphene flakes from the graphitic substrate to the colloidal probe. It was suggested that friction vanishes due to crystalline incommensurability at the sliding interface thus formed. However several details are missing, including the roles of tribolayer roughness and of loading conditions. Hereafter we gain deeper insight into the tribological response of micrometric silica beads sliding on graphite under ambient conditions. We show that the tribotransferred flakes increase interfacial roughness from tenths to several nanometers, in fact causing a breakdown of adhesion and friction by one order of magnitude. Furthermore, they behave as protruding asperities dissipating mechanical energy via atomic-scale stick-slip instabilities. Remarkably, such contact junctions can undergo a load-driven transition from continuous superlubric sliding to dissipative stick-slip, that agrees with the single-asperity Prandtl-Tomlinson model. Our results indicate that friction at mesoscopic silica-graphite junctions depends on the specific energy landscape experienced by the topographically-highest triboinduced nanoasperity. Superlubricity may arise from the load-controlled competition between interfacial crystalline incommensurability and contact pinning effects.



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A single graphene layer placed between two parallel Ni(111) surfaces screens the strong attractive force and results in a significant reduction of adhesion and sliding friction. When two graphene layers are inserted, each graphene is attached to one of the metal surfaces with a significant binding and reduces the adhesion further. In the sliding motion of these surfaces the transition from stick-slip to continuous sliding is attained, whereby non-equilibrium phonon generation through sudden processes is suppressed. The adhesion and corrugation strength continues to decrease upon insertion of the third graphene layer and eventually saturates at a constant value with increasing number of graphene layers. In the absence of Ni surfaces, the corrugation strength of multilayered graphene is relatively higher and practically independent of the number of layers. Present first-principles calculations reveal the superlubricant feature of graphene layers placed between pseudomorphic Ni(111) surfaces, which is achieved through the coupling of Ni-3d and graphene-$pi$ orbitals. The effect of graphene layers inserted between a pair of parallel Cu(111) and Al(111) surfaces are also discussed. The treatment of sliding friction under the constant loading force, by taking into account the deformations corresponding to any relative positions of sliding slabs, is the unique feature of our study.
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