Departments of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science and Chemical & Environmental Engineering and Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena (CRISP), Yale University , New Haven, Connecticut 06520, United States.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) , P.O. Box 3640, Karlsruhe 76021, Germany.
ACS Nano. 2016 Jan 26;10(1):38-41. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.5b08251. Epub 2016 Jan 14.
The Prandtl-Tomlinson model of friction, first introduced in 1928 as a "conceptual model" for a single-atom contact, consists of a point mass that is dragged over a sinusoidal potential by a spring. After decades of virtual oblivion, it has recently found impressive validation for contacts comprising tens or even hundreds of atoms. To date, the Prandtl-Tomlinson model enjoys widespread popularity as depicting arguably the most insightful mechanical analogue to atomic-scale effects occurring at sliding interfaces. In this issue of ACS Nano, Pawlak et al. demonstrate the model's applicability to a true single-atom contact, thereby illustrating that simple mechanical representations can indeed go a long way toward explaining interactions at atomically defined interfaces.
普朗特-汤姆林森摩擦模型于 1928 年首次作为单原子接触的“概念模型”提出，它由一个点质量组成，该点质量通过弹簧在正弦势上被拖动。在经历了几十年的虚拟遗忘之后，它最近在包含数十个甚至数百个原子的接触中得到了令人印象深刻的验证。迄今为止，普朗特-汤姆林森模型作为描绘滑动界面处原子级效应的最具洞察力的机械模拟而广受青睐。在本期 ACS Nano 中，Pawlak 等人证明了该模型在真正的单原子接触中的适用性，从而说明了简单的机械表示确实可以在很大程度上解释原子定义界面的相互作用。
