Interfacial friction obtained by lateral manipulation of nanoparticles using atomic force microscopy techniques

Nanometer scale metallic particles have been manipulated on an atomically flat graphite surface by atomic force microscopy techniques and quantitative information on interfacial friction was extracted from the lateral manipulation of these nanoparticles. Similar to conventional friction force microscopy, the particle-surface interfacial friction was extracted from the torsional signal of the cantilever during the particle pushing process. As a model system, we chose antimony particles with diameters between 50 and 500 nm grown on a highly oriented pyrolytic graphite substrate. Three different manipulation strategies have been developed, which either enable the defined manipulation of individual nanoparticles or can be utilized to gather data on a larger number of particles found within a particular scan area, allowing for fast and statistically significant data collection. While the manipulation strategies are demonstrated here for operation under vacuum conditions, extensive testing indicated that the proposed methods are likewise suited for ambient environments. Since these techniques can be applied to a large variety of chemically and structurally different material combinations as well as a large range of particle sizes, our results indicate a viable route to solve many recent issues in the field of nanoscale friction, such as the influence of contact size and interface crystallinity.