Influence of substrate potential shape on the dynamics of a sliding lubricant chain

Abstract

We investigate the frictional sliding of an incommensurate chain of interacting particles confined in between two nonlinear on-site substrate potential profiles in relative motion. We focus here on the class of Remoissenet-Peyrard parametrized potentials $V_{\mathrm{RP}}(x,s)$, whose shape can be varied continuously as a function of $s$, recovering the sine-Gordon potential as particular case. The observed frictional dynamics of the system, crucially dependent on the mutual ratios of the three periodicities in the sandwich geometry, turns out to be significantly influenced also by the shape of the substrate potential. Specifically, variations of the shape parameter $s$ affects significantly and not trivially the existence and robustness of the recently reported velocity quantization phenomena [Vanossi {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 056101 (2006)], where the chain center-of-mass velocity to the externally imposed relative velocity of the sliders stays pinned to exact "plateau" values for wide ranges of the dynamical parameters.

7 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Atomistic simulations of the sliding friction of graphene flakes
• Static and dynamic friction in sliding colloidal monolayers
• Experimental observation of directional locking and dynamical ordering of colloidal monolayers driven across quasiperiodic substrates
• Exactly quantized dynamics of classical incommensurate sliders
• Asymmetric frictional sliding between incommensurate surfaces
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• Solitons and exact velocity quantization of incommensurate sliders
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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Friction and Nonlinear Dynamics