Surface defects and temperature on atomic friction

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of the effect of surface defects on atomic friction in the stick–slip dynamical regime of a minimalistic model. We focus on how the presence of defects and temperature change the average properties of the system. We have identified two main mechanisms which modify the mean friction force of the system when defects are considered. As expected, defects change the potential profile locally and thus affect the friction force. But the presence of defects also changes the probability distribution function of the tip slip length and thus the mean friction force. We corroborated both effects for different values of temperature, external load, dragging velocity and damping. We also show a comparison of the effects of surface defects and surface disorder on the dynamics of the system.