M ay 2 00 6 Adsorbate induced enhancement of electrostatic non - contact friction

We study the non-contact friction between an atomic force microscope tip and a metal substrate in the presence of bias voltage. The friction is due to energy losses in the sample created by the electromagnetic field from the oscillating charges induced on the tip surface by the bias voltage. We show that the friction can be enhanced by many orders of magnitude if the adsorbate layer can support acoustic vibrations. The theory predicts the magnitude and the distance dependence of friction in a good agreement with recent puzzling non-contact friction experiment [3].We demonstrate that even an isolated adsorbate can produce high enough friction to be measured experimentally. A great deal of attention has been devoted to non-contact friction between an atomic force microscope tip and a substrate [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. This is related to the practical importance of non-contact friction for ultrasensitive force detection experiments. The ability to detect small forces is inextricably linked to friction via the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. For example, the detection of single spins by magnetic resonance force microscopy [6], which has 1