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The melting of metallic nanoparticles is governed by surface pre-melting, a phenomenon traditionally modeled as the isotropic growth of a uniform liquid shell. Challenging this classical view, we report facet-dependent surface pre-melting…
Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…
The modes of attachments, detachments and relaxations of molecules of rubbers and gels on solid surfaces are keys to understanding their frictional properties. An early stochastic model of polymer relaxations on surfaces was given by…
The melting transitions of a colloidal lattice confined to a two-dimensional ($2D$) periodic substrate of square symmetry are studied using Monte Carlo simulations. When the strengths of interparticle and particle-substrate interactions are…
We present a molecular dynamics study of the flow of rigid spherical nanoparticles in a simple fluid. We evaluate the viscosity of the dispersion as a function of shear rate and nanoparticle volume fraction. We observe shear thinning…
Slippery covalently attached liquid surfaces (SCALS) are a family of nanothin polymer layers with remarkably low static droplet friction, characterised by a low contact angle hysteresis (CAH$< 5 \deg$), which makes them ideally suited to…
We report on memory effects involved in the transient frictional response of a contact interface between a silicone rubber and a spherical glass probe when it is perturbed by changes in the orientation of the driving motion or by velocity…
The physics of sliding friction is gaining impulse from nanoscale and mesoscale experiments, simulations, and theoretical modeling. This Colloquium reviews some recent developments in modeling and in atomistic simulation of friction,…
Nanowires play a pivotal role across a spectrum of disciplines such as nanoelectromechanical systems, nanoelectronics, and energy applications. As nanowires continue to diminish in dimensions, their mechanical characteristics are…
We calculate the friction of fully mobile graphene flakes sliding on graphite. For incommensurately stacked flakes, we find a sudden and reversible increase in friction with load, in agreement with experimental observations. The transition…
In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the contact mechanics associated with a micron-sized sliding asperity, which plays a crucial role in the abrasive wear processes. Utilising nanoscratch testing, we experimentally…
Molecular dynamics simulation have shown that after initial surface melting, nanowires can melt via two mechanisms: an interface front moves towards the wire centre; the growth of an instability at the interface can cause the solid to…
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…
Via molecular dynamics simulations, we unveil the hysteretic nature of the jamming transition of soft repulsive frictionless spheres, as it occurs varying the volume fraction or the shear stress. In a given range of control parameters the…
Lubricants are widely used in macroscopic mechanical systems to reduce friction and wear. However, on the microscopic scale, it is not clear to what extent lubricants are beneficial. Therefore, in this study, we consider two diamond…
The sliding columnar phase is a new liquid-crystalline phase of matter composed of two-dimensional smectic lattices stacked one on top of the other. This phase is characterized by strong orientational but weak positional correlations…
We report on the transient frictional response of contacts between a rigid spherical glass probe and a micrometer-thick poly(dimethylacrylamide) hydrogel film grafted onto a glass substrate when a lateral relative motion is applied to the…
We describe experiments on monodisperse spherical particles in an annular cell geometry, vibrated from below and sheared from above. This system shows a freezing/melting transition such that under sufficient vibration a crystallized state…
The surface tension of partially wetting droplets deforms soft substrates. These deformations are usually localized to a narrow region near the contact line, forming a so-called `elastocapillary ridge.' When a droplet slides along a…
We theoretically explore the effect of a transverse electric field on the frictional response of a bi-layer of packed zwitterionic molecules. The dipole-moment reorientation promoted by the electric field can lead to either stick-slip or…