Effect of temperature and velocity on superlubricity

Abstract: We study the effects of temperature and sliding velocity on superlubricity in numerical simulations of the Frenkel-Kontorova model. We show that resonant excitations of the phonons in an incommensurate sliding body lead to an effective friction and to thermal equilibrium with energy distributed over the internal degrees of freedom. For finite temperature, the effective friction can be described well by a viscous damping force, with a damping coefficient that emerges naturally from the microscopic dynamics. This damping coefficient is a non-monotonic function of the sliding velocity which peaks around resonant velocities and increases with temperature. At low velocities, it remains finite and nonzero, indicating the preservation of superlubricity in the zero-velocity limit. Finally, we propose experimental systems in which our results could be verified.