Ubiquitous Stick-Slip Motions: from Tribology, Biosensing to Carbon Capture

Contact and friction are omnipresent and play essential roles in the physical world, ranging from the tectonic earthquake along fault lines to the nanoscale antibody-antigen recognition. Besides the well-known steady-sliding of any two contacting objects (e.g. with lubrication), many interfacial lateral motions are in the nonequilibrium stick-slip fashion that in general can cause surface damages and thus should be avoided. Theoretically, stick-slip motions occur when the shear velocity is slow and the interfacial interaction is strong, as described in the Prandtl-Tomlinson model. In this talk, I will present molecular dynamics (MD) studies for ubiquitous stick-slip phenomena in various developed/developing nanotechnologies, such as the motion of an AFM tip on a solid surface [1], the transport of biological molecules (DNA or proteins) through nanopores [2,3], and the capture of CO₂ into solid sorbents with open metal sites [4]. These works highlight the possibility of taking the advantage of stick-slip motions in development of novel nanotechnologies.



[1] Luan and Robbins, Physical Review Letters 93 (3), 036105, 2004

[2] Luan et. al, Physical Review Letters 104 (23), 238103, 2010.

[3] Smolyanitsky and Luan, Physical Review Letters 127 (13), 138103. 2021

[4] Zheng et. al, to be published.