Bridging the Gap Between the Atomic-Scale and Macroscopic Modeling of Friction

A short survey of a modern view on the problem of friction from the physical viewpoint is presented. An atomically thin lubricant film confined between two substrates in moving contact has been studied with the help of molecular dynamics (MD) based on Langevin equations with coordinate- and velocity-dependent damping coefficient. Depending on model parameters, the system may exhibit either the liquid sliding regime, when the lubricant film melts during sliding (the “melting-freezing” mechanism of stick-slip motion), the “layer-over-layer” sliding regime, when the film keeps a layered structure at sliding, or the solid sliding regime, which may provide an extremely low friction (“superlubricity”). Atomic-scale MD simulations of friction, however, lead to a “viscosity” of the thin film, as well as to the critical velocity of the transition from stick-slip to smooth sliding, which differ by many orders of magnitude from the values observed in macroscopic experiments. This contradiction can be resolved with the help of the earthquakelike (EQ) model with a continuous distribution of static thresholds. The evolution of the EQ model is reduced to a master equation which can be solved analytically. This approach describes stick-slip and smooth sliding regimes of tribological systems within a framework which separates the calculation of the friction force from the atomic-scale studies of contact properties.