Control of friction at the nanoscale

Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Mar 7;90(9):094301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.094301. Epub 2003 Mar 5.

Abstract

We propose a new algorithm to control frictional dynamics of a small array of particles towards preassigned values of the average sliding velocity. The control is based on the concepts of non-Lipschitzian dynamics and terminal attractor. Extensive numerical simulations illustrate the robustness, efficiency, and convenience of the algorithm.