[Research Highlights Vol.48] Origins of Macroscopic Friction Linked to Energy Landscape on the Nanoscale

Everybody is familiar with friction — the phenomenon plays an important role in our daily lives. Yet, although phenomenological laws exist that describe friction on the macroscale, a detailed understanding of the processes involved on the microscale is lacking. Now, Hiroshi Sakuma and Shigeru Suehara (the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan) with their colleagues have studied friction forces in mica, both theoretically and experimentally, and have found the origin of molecular friction in this system.