Imaging high-speed friction at the nanometer scale

Abstract

Friction is a complicated phenomenon involving nonlinear dynamics at different length and time scales[1, 2]. The microscopic origin of friction is poorly understood, due in part to a lack of methods for measuring the force on a nanometer-scale asperity sliding at velocity of the order of cm/s.[3, 4] Despite enormous advance in experimental techniques[5], this combination of small length scale and high velocity remained illusive. Here we present a technique for rapidly measuring the frictional forces on a single asperity (an AFM tip) over a velocity range from zero to several cm/s. At each image pixel we obtain the velocity dependence of both conservative and dissipative forces, revealing the transition from stick-slip to a smooth sliding friction[1, 6]. We explain measurements on graphite using a modified Prandtl-Tomlinson model that takes into account the damped elastic deformation of the asperity. With its greatly improved force sensitivity and very small sliding amplitude, our method enables rapid and detailed surface mapping of the full velocity-dependence of frictional forces with less than 10~nm spatial resolution.

arXiv comment7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Modeling friction: From nanoscale to mesoscale
• Interaction imaging with amplitude-dependence force spectroscopy
• The Intermodulation Lockin Analyzer
• The Role of Nonlinear Dynamics in Quantitative Atomic Force Microscopy
• Interpreting motion and force for narrow-band intermodulation atomic force microscopy

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Calibrating torsional eigenmodes of micro cantilevers for dynamic measurement of frictional forces
• A Milli-Kelvin Atomic Force Microscope Made of Glass
• Excitation frequency dependence of noise and minimum detectable force in amplitude-modulation atomic force microscopy