Published in Physics World, 5 Apr 2012
Researchers in China and Australia have observed superlubricity – the dropping of friction to near zero – on length scales much larger than before. They say that the phenomenon, which they measured in sheared pieces of graphite, could find applications in sensitive microscopic resonators or nanoscale gyroscopes.
Superlubricity is sometimes used to mean simply very low friction, but the original meaning is that the friction between two surfaces disappears almost completely. Proposed in the early 1990s by Motohisa Hirano, then at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in Tokyo, Japan, and others, it relies on a special arrangement of atoms on a material’s surface. In graphite, for instance, the surface atoms have a bumpy hexagonal arrangement like egg-boxes. In certain orientations, two surfaces of graphite can mesh in such a way that the “bumps” can slide past one other effortlessly – and friction drops towards zero. […]
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