Molecular Friction-Induced Electroosmotic Phenomena in Thin Neutral Nanotubes

Contact phenomena in carbon nanotubes

Poor screening of the long-range Coulomb interaction in one-dimensional carbon nanotubes results in a peculiar picture of contact phenomena. Being brought to a contact with a metal, conducting nanotube accumulates electric charge whose density decays slowly with the distance from the contact. This should be contrasted to a conventional metal-metal contact where the charge density decreases expo...

Dynamical modeling with application to friction phenomena

Surfactant-induced electroosmotic flow in microfluidic capillaries.

Control of EOF in microfluidic devices is essential in applications such as protein/DNA sizing and high-throughput drug screening. With the growing popularity of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) as the substrate for polymeric-based microfludics, it is important to understand the effect of surfactants on EOF in these devices. In this article, we present an extensive investigation exploring chang...

Molecular dissipation phenomena of nanoscopic friction in the heterogeneous relaxation regime of a glass former.

Nanoscale sliding friction involving a polystyrene melt near its glass transition temperature Tg (373 K) exhibited dissipation phenomena that provide insight into the underlying molecular relaxation processes. A dissipative length scale that shows significant parallelism with the size of cooperatively rearranging regions (CRRs) could be experimentally deduced from friction-velocity isotherms, c...

Macroscopic diagnostics of microscopic friction phenomena.

We show that the static friction force which must be overcome to render a sticking contact sliding is reduced if an external torque is also exerted. As a test system we study a planar disk lying on a horizontal flat surface. We perform experiments and compare with analytical results to find that the coupling between static friction force and torque is nontrivial: It is not determined by the Cou...