Possible nearly frictionless sliding for mesoscopic solids

Quantum heat transfer through an atomic wire

“…In these studies, the emphasis is placed on the energy dissipation. The mechanical energy of the relative motion is dissipated by (a) the creation of electron-hole pairs, and (b) by the creation of nonequilibrium phonon distribution at the close proximity of the asperity 12,13 . In the latter case, the main issue is the thermal conductance related to the heat transfer between the vibrational modes of the asperities (or lubricant molecule) and those of the objects, that leads to the energy dissipation 14 .…”

“…Heat transfer through a nanoobject is also related to the atomic scale dry friction and lubrication [11][12][13] . When two objects move relative to each other, they engage in contact through various atomic scale asperities or lubricant molecules.…”

Onset of Sliding Friction in Incommensurate Systems

“…The dissipative mechanism is driven by the coupling of the CM to the modes with modulation wavevector q or its harmonics, ω nq , and consists in a novel kind of parametric resonances with much wider windows of instabilities than those deriving from the standard Mathieu equation [15]. The importance of harmonic resonances at ω nq has been pointed out before [6,8,10], with the suggestion [10] that they could be absent in finite systems due to the discreteness of the phonon spectrum. However, it has not been realized that they act as a driving term for the onset of dissipation via subsequent complex parametric excitations which we shall describe, establishing quantitative estimates for their existence in finite systems.…”

“…(2) with initial momenta p n = P 0 and x n (t = 0) corresponding to the ground state. For a given velocity P , parti-cles pass over maxima of the potential with frequency Ω = 2πP , the so-called washboard frequency [8,10]. = 0.2966.…”

“…Most studies are carried out for one-dimensional non-linear lattices [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and in particular for the Frenkel-Kontorova (FK) model [13], where the surface layer is modeled by a harmonic chain and the substrate is replaced by a rigid periodic modulation potential. The majority [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] examines the steady state of the dynamical FK model in presence of dissipation representing the coupling of phonons to other, undescribed degrees of freedom.We study the dynamics of an undriven incommensurate FK chain. Our aim is to ascertain whether the experimentally observed superlubricity [14] can be due to the blocking of the phonon channels caused by an incommensurate contact of the two sliding surfaces.…”