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Upon shearing a microscale lithographically defined graphite mesa, the sheared section retracts spontaneously to minimize interface energy. Here, we demonstrate a sixfold symmetry of the self-retraction and provide a first experimental estimate of the frictional force involved, as direct evidence that the self-retraction is due to superlubricity, where ultralow friction occurs between incommensurate surfaces. The effect is remarkable because it occurs reproducibly under ambient conditions and over a contact area of up to 10×10  μm2, more than 7 orders of magnitude larger than previous scanning-probe-based studies of superlubricity in graphite. By analyzing the sheared interface, we show how the grain structure of highly oriented pyrolitic graphite determines the probability of self-retraction. Our results demonstrate that such self-retraction provides a novel probe of superlubricity, and the robustness of the phenomenon opens the way for practical applications of superlubricity in micromechanical systems.

Using equilibrium and nonequilibrium molecular dynamic simulations, we found that engineering the strain on the graphene planes forming a channel can drastically change the interfacial friction of water transport through it. There is a sixfold change of interfacial friction stress when the strain changes from -10% to 10%. Stretching the graphene walls increases the interfacial shear stress, while compressing the graphene walls reduces it. Detailed analysis of the molecular structure reveals the essential roles of the interfacial potential energy barrier and the structural commensurateness between the solid walls and the first water layer. Our results suggest that the strain engineering is an effective way of controlling the water transport inside nanochannels. The resulting quantitative relations between shear stress and slip velocity and the understanding of the molecular mechanisms will be invaluable in designing graphene nanochannel devices.

We investigate here water flow passing a single-walled carbon nanotube (CNT), through analysis based on combined atomistic and continuum mechanics simulations. The relation between drag coefficient C(D) and Reynolds number Re is obtained for a wide range of flow speed u from 5 to 600 m/s. The results suggest that Stokes law for creep flow works well for small Reynolds numbers up to 0.1 (u ≈ 100 m/s), and indicates a linear dependence between drag force and flow velocity. Significant deviation is observed at elevated Re values, which is discussed by considering the interfacial slippage, reduction of viscosity due to friction-induced local heating, and flow-induced structural vibration. We find that interfacial slippage has a limited contribution to the reduction of the resistance, and excitations of low-frequency vibration modes in the carbon nanotube play an important role in energy transfer between water and carbon nanotubes, especially at high flow speeds where drastic enhancement of the carbon nanotube vibration is observed. The results reported here reveal nanoscale fluid-structure interacting mechanisms, and lay the ground for rational design of nanofluidics and nanoelectromechanical devices operating in a fluidic environment.

Liquid slip is essential in nanofluidic systems, as shrinking channel size leads to a dramatic increase in flow resistance and thus high-energy consumption for driving nonslip flow. Using large-scale nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulation of water flowing in carbon nanotubes (CNT's), we show that the relationship between the CNT wall-water interfacial friction stress and slip velocity follows a transition-state-theory-based inverse hyperbolic sine function, which remains universally valid regardless of wetting properties, CNT chiralities, and CNT sizes, and holds for all slip velocities from 0 to 1400 m/s. The finding could benefit the research in desalination and other chemical purification techniques.

The atomic size mismatch between different binary semiconductors has been long known to limit their mutual solubility, leading instead to phase separation into incoherent phases, forming inhomogeneous mixtures that severely limit technological applications that rely on carrier transport. We show here that this atomic size mismatch can lead, under coherent conditions, to the formation of a homogeneous alloy with characteristic (201) two-monolayer ordering. This occurs because such specific layer arrangement corresponds to a unique strain-minimizing network in tetrahedral systems.

There has been much debate on the choice for the representative wall thickness for the thin-shell model, although this model has demonstrated remarkable success in capturing many types of behavior of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), in determining the buckling strains under compression, torsion, and bending, in particular. This analysis, using the Tersoff-Brenner potential and ab initio calculations, shows that the elasticity of the model thin shell evolves from isotropic to square symmetric with the decreasing tube diameter, leading to significant diameter dependence for all the elastic moduli and the representative wall thickness. Furthermore, the elastic moduli of multiwalled carbon nanotubes of diameters up to 10 nm are also size dependent.

A recent study determined the Young's modulus of carbon nanotubes by measuring resonance frequency and using the modulus-frequency relation resulting from the linear vibration theory. It leads to the report that the Young's modulus decreases sharply, from about 1 to 0.1 TPa with the diameter D increasing from 8 to 40 nanometers, and the investigators attributed this decrease to the emergence of an unusual bending mode during the measurement that corresponds to rippling on the inner arc of the bent nanotubes. The nonlinear analysis presented in this paper that captures the rippling mode suggests that the effective Young's modulus can indeed decrease substantially with increasing diameter, and that the results from the classical linear theory may be invalid in such measurements.