Making, breaking and sliding of nanometer-scale contacts
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab., CA (United States). Materials Sciences Div.
As devices shrink in size, the increased surface-to-volume ratio of the component materials ensures that interfacial forces such as friction and adhesion can play dominant roles. This fact is painfully appreciated by the designers of microelectromechanical systems (MEMs) who often observe catastrophic failure of MEMs devices due to adhesion, friction and resultant wear. Understanding these interfacial forces should allow such problems to be remedied, and furthermore, the relative strength of these forces could potentially be exploited for specific micro- and nano-scale device applications. Here, the contact between an atomic force microscope tip and a sample surface can form an ideal single asperity of nanometer dimensions, where the interaction forces can be measured with sub-nanoNewton force resolution. Studies of contact, adhesion and friction for these nano-asperities have been carried out for a variety of tips and single crystal sample surfaces. The major result is the observation of proportionality between friction and true contact area for a variety of systems, and an impressive agreement with continuum mechanics models for contact area even at the nanometer scale. The relevant continuum models can in fact be understood in the framework of fracture mechanics.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, ON (Canada); USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC03-76SF00098
- OSTI ID:
- 364054
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-981104-; TRN: IM9934%%79
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Fall meeting of the Materials Research Society, Boston, MA (United States), 30 Nov - 4 Dec 1998; Other Information: PBD: 1999; Related Information: Is Part Of Fracture and ductile vs. brittle behavior -- Theory, modeling and experiment; Beltz, G.E. [ed.] [Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, CA (United States)]; Selinger, R.L.B. [ed.] [Catholic Univ., Washington, DC (United States)]; Kim, K.S. [ed.] [Brown Univ., Providence, RI (United States)]; Marder, M.P. [ed.] [Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX (United States)]; PB: 345 p.; Materials Research Society symposium proceedings, Volume 539
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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