Adsorbate vibrational modes enhancement of radiative heat transfer and van der Waals friction

Abstract

We study the dependence of the heat transfer and the van der Waals friction between two semi-infinite solids on the dielectric properties of the bodies. We show that the heat transfer and van der Waals friction at short separation between the solids may increase by many orders of magnitude when the surfaces are covered by adsorbates, or can support low-frequency surface plasmons. In this case the heat transfer and van der Waals friction are determined by resonant photon tunneling between adsorbate vibrational modes, or surface plasmon modes. The enhancement of the van der Waals friction is especially large when in the adsorbed layer there is an acoustic branch for the vibrations parallel to the surface like in the case of Cs adsorption on Cu(100) surface. In this case we show that even for separation $d=10$nm, the van der Waals friction induced by adsorbates can be so large that it can be measured with the present state-of-art equipment. The van an der Waals friction is characterized by a strong distance dependence ($\sim 1/d^6$), and at the small distances it can be much larger than \textit{the electrostatic} friction observed in \cite{Stipe}. \vskip 0.3cm \textit{Keywords}: non-contact friction, van der Waals friction, radiative heat transfer, atomic force microscope, adsorbate vibrational mode

published in Surface Science

References in corpus (8)

• Radiative heat transfer between nanostructures
• Resonant photon tunneling enhancement of the radiative heat transfer
• Dissipative Van der Waals interaction between a small particle and a metal surface
• Resonant photon tunneling enhancement of the van der Waals friction
• Non-contact friction between nanostructures
• Adsorbate induced enhancement of electrostatic non-contact friction
• Frictional drag between quantum wells mediated by fluctuating electromagnetic field
• Adsorbate vibrational mode enhancement of radiative heat transfer