Contacts With Negative Work of “Adhesion” and Superlubricity

Abstract

Van der Waals forces between solids in vacuum are always attractive and are considered as the main source of adhesion. However, in the presence of an intermediate medium, they can also be repelling (Dzyaloshinskii et al., 1961) which means that the “work of adhesion” becomes negative. Similarly to the case of adhesion, the interaction range of these forces can be either comparable (or larger) than the minimum characteristic length scale of the contact problem or it can be negligible compared with all characteristic length scales. We call this latter case the “JKR-approximation,” as the JKR theory of adhesion (Johnson et al., 1971) is also valid in this limit. The repelling interaction can also be due to the presence (and squeezing out) of a thin fluid layer between solids as considered in Müser (2014). In the papers Popov and Hess (2018) and Heß and Popov (2019), it was shown that the contact of two oppositely charged surfaces at a constant voltage is equivalent to the adhesive contact with an effective van der Waals interaction. Similarly, the contact of the bodies with the same charge would be equivalent to repelling van derWaals forces with a negative work of adhesion. Further kinds of repelling forces may be solvation, structural, and hydration forces (Israelachvili, 2011). In the following, we speak about van derWaals forces, but they are thought as representative for a larger class of long range repelling forces. We argue that in the JKR approximation, the Hertz’ solution of the contact problem with a repelling van der Waals interaction, remains practically unchanged. However, the contact area falls apart into the area of “weak (van der Waals) interaction” and “strong (rigid wall) interaction.” It is speculated that if the normal force is smaller than a critical value at which the core region of strong interaction disappears, a macroscopic superlubricity state of the contact may be observed.