Nanotribology: Nonlinear mechanisms of friction

Abstract

Friction with its related nonlinear dynamics is a vast interdisciplinary field, involving complex physical processes over a wide range of length and time scales. The accelerated progress in experimental and computational techniques, often leading to complex detailed dynamical patterns, has vigorously stimulated the search and implementation of idealized experimental frameworks and simplermathematical models, capable of describing and interpreting, in amore immediateway, the essential physics involved in nonlinear sliding phenomena.