Thin lubricant films confined between crystalline surfaces: Gold versus mica

In this paper we report molecular dynamics simulation results of lubricant films only a few nanometres thick confined between atomically smooth gold or model mica surfaces. We have studied dodecane (C 12 H 26 ) of various film thicknesses. We show below a critical film thickness structural transitions take place with the formation of crystal bridges. We demonstrate this critical film thickness is larger with Au(1 0 0) surface. Below this critical film thickness we observe a large enhancement of apparent shear viscosity. This enhancement, however, is much lower for films confined by gold. We find the extrapolated zero shear viscosity of a ∼2.4-nm-thick film confined by gold is almost two orders of magnitude lower than that of a film, of the same thickness, confined by model mica. We find the source of this difference is the weaker pinning of the layers next to the surface of the gold. This leads to stronger slip, at the lubricant–gold interface, which persists at solid-like and liquid-like states. For mica a larger part of shearing takes place inside the film. The solid-like structure of the films confined by gold shows stronger resilience to shear and melt at considerably larger shear rates than those confined by model mica surfaces. These differences could be important in developing low friction devices at microscale.