Interfacial Viscosity Measurements of Adsorbed Monolayers on Metal Surfaces

摘要

At the outset of this project, we had just developed a technique, employing aquartz crystal microbalance, for measuring the sliding friction coefficient of a molecularly thin film adsorbed on a metal surface. Funding of the project allowed us to carry out a range of measurements documenting the friction coefficient under various circumstances. The measurements were the first of any kind to quantitatively probe how much force is required on average to slide an atom across an interface, and were in the mainstream of the emerging field of nanotribology (a word coined by our group, which has now made it to the cover of scientific journals). They hold the world record for the shortest time scale on which friction experiments have been carried out, allowing them to be exactly modelled by molecular dynamics simulations.