Tuning Electronic Friction in Structural Superlubric Schottky Junctions.

Friction at sliding interfaces, even in the atomistically smooth limit, can proceed through many energy dissipation channels, such as phononic and electronic excitation. These processes are often entangled and difficult to distinguish, eliminate, and control, especially in the presence of wear. Structural superlubricity (SSL) is a wear-free state with ultralow friction that closes most of the dissipation channels, except for electronic friction, which raises a critical concern of how to effectively eliminate and control such a channel.

ConfSolv: Prediction of Solute Conformer-Free Energies across a Range of Solvents.

Predicting Gibbs free energy of solution is key to understanding the solvent effects on thermodynamics and reaction rates for kinetic modeling. Accurately computing solution free energies requires the enumeration and evaluation of relevant solute conformers in solution. However, even after generation of relevant conformers, determining their free energy of solution requires an expensive workflow consisting of several ab initio computational chemistry calculations.

Robust microscale structural superlubricity between graphite and nanostructured surface.

Structural superlubricity is a state of nearly zero friction and no wear between two contacted solid surfaces. However, such state has a certain probability of failure due to the edge defects of graphite flake. Here, we achieve robust structural superlubricity state between microscale graphite flakes and nanostructured silicon surfaces under ambient condition.