Related papers: Electrical charges and tribology of insulating mat…

The tendency of materials to order in triboelectric series has prompted suggestions that contact electrification might have a single, unified underlying description. However, the possibility of triboelectric cycles, i.e. series that loop…

We report a computational strategy to obtain the charges of individual dielectric particles from experimental observation of their interactions as a function of time. This strategy uses evolutionary optimization to minimize the difference…

The surface of an insulating material irradiated by a beam of low energy electrons charges positively if the yield of secondary electron is greater than unity. For such a dynamical equilibrium, the thermodynamic properties have been…

Electric Scanning Probe Microscopies are used to characterize the surface behavior of ferroelectric materials. The effects of local charge density on the chemistry and physics of ferroelectric surfaces are investigated. The kinetics and…

We show that the friction force and torque, acting at a dry contact of two objects moving and rotating relative to each other, are inherently coupled. As a simple test system, a sliding and spinning disk on a horizontal flat surface is…

It has been widely reported that as water contacts hydrophobic materials such as air or hydrocarbons (liquid or solid), the interfaces acquire a negative charge. It is not entirely clear whether this occurs due to the nature of water, or…

Coupled systems in mesoscopic regime are of interest as charge fluctuation between the sub-systems will depend on electron-electron interactions and will play a dominant role in determining their thermodynamic properties. We study some…

Ferroelectricity is commonly understood in terms of dynamical charges, which represent the dipole moments generated by atomic displacements or the forces induced by electric fields. In ferroelectrics with a high degree of symmetry, the…

Fluid triboelectrification, also known as flow electrification, remains an under-explored yet ubiquitous phenomenon with potential applications from material science to planetary evolution. Building upon previous efforts to position water…

We review the concept of surface charge, first in the context of the polarization in ferroelectric materials, and second in the context of layers of charged ions in ionic insulators. While the former is traditionally discussed in the…

We study the thermal fluctuation induced interactions between two surfaces containing Brownian charges which are held at different temperatures. Using a dynamical form of Debye-H\"uckel theory implemented within the stochastic equation for…

For the contact of two finite portions of interacting rigid crystalline surfaces, we compute the dependence of the pinning energy barrier on the misfit angle and contact area. The resulting data are used to investigate the distribution of…

We investigate the problem of the electron interacting with the charge induced on the metal or dielectric surface. We show that the interaction between the electron and the induced surface charge leads to the lateral confinement of the…

We consider ferroelectric phase transitions in both short-circuited and biased ferroelectric-semiconductor films with a space (depletion) charge which leads to some unusual behavior. It is shown that in the presence of the charge the…

We use a string of confined $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions to measure perturbations to a trapping potential which are caused by light-induced charging of an anti-reflection coated window and of insulating patches on the ion-trap electrodes. The…

We theoretically examined how the dielectric screening of two-dimensional layered materials affects the dipolar interaction between interlayer excitons in few-layer van der Waals structures. Our analysis indicates that the dipolar…

Surface-bound electric charge on polymer materials can strongly influence droplet behaviour and solid-liquid charge transfer, but the mechanisms and the means to control these effects remain unclear. In this work, we systematically…

Recent tribological experiments revealed that graphene is able to lubricate macroscale steel-on-steel sliding contacts very effectively both in dry and humid conditions. This effect has been attributed to a mechanical action of graphene…

We investigate the morphology and mechanics of a naturally curved elastic arch loaded at its center and frictionally supported at both ends on a flat, rigid substrate. Through systematic numerical simulations, we classify the observed…

We explore dynamic structural superlubricity for the case of a relatively large contact area, where the friction force is proportional to the area (exceeding $\sim 100\,nm^2$) experimentally, numerically, and theoretically. We use a setup…