Resonant photon tunneling enhancement of the van der Waals friction

Abstract

We study the van der Waals friction between two flat metal surfaces in relative motion. For good conductors we find that normal relative motion gives a much larger friction than for parallel relative motion. The friction may increase by many order of magnitude when the surfaces are covered by adsorbates, or can support low-frequency surface plasmons. In this case the friction is determined by resonant photon tunneling between adsorbate vibrational modes, or surface plasmon modes.

Published in PRL

References in corpus (4)

• Radiative heat transfer between nanostructures
• Theory of friction: contribution from fluctuating electromagnetic field
• Dissipative Van der Waals interaction between a small particle and a metal surface
• Frictional drag between quantum wells mediated by fluctuating electromagnetic field

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