Eur. Phys. J.

B (2014) 87: 185

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2014-50072-x

THE EUROPEAN
PHYSICAL JOURNAL B

Regular Article

Quantum friction controlled by plasmons

between graphene sheets
Tong-Biao Wang1,2,a , Nian-Hua Liu2,3 , Jiang-Tao Liu2,3 , and Tian-Bao Yu2
1
2
3

Center for Nano and Micro Mechanics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, P.R. China
Department of Physics, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, P.R. China
Institute for Advanced Study, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, P.R. China
Received 31 January 2014 / Received in nal form 13 May 2014
c EDP Sciences, Societ`
Published online 11 August 2014 
a Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag 2014
Abstract. We theoretically study quantum friction between two innite graphene sheets, which is controlled
by plasmons excited at the interfaces of graphenes and dielectrics. In near-eld regime, quantum friction
can be enhanced due to the coupling of plasmons between two graphene sheets. Dependences of friction
coecient on distance, chemical potential of graphene, temperature of environment, and dielectric constant
of substrate have been investigated in detail. Friction coecient can be increased by increasing temperature
or dielectric constants of substrates, and can be reduced by increasing distance or chemical potential.

1 Introduction
Friction is a very common phenomenon in nature, it exists universally from macro- to micro-scale. Meanwhile,
friction is a very complex process, it generally involves
collision, exchange, and heat transfer between atoms, and
even the radiation of electromagnetic waves between objects. When the size of mechanical devices shrink to atomic
scale, the ratio of surface and volume becomes very large,
surface force plays very important role in such scale.
Therefore, friction is a grand challenge in the fabrication of reliable micro- and nano-electromechanical systems. Besides existing between objects in contact, friction
even occurs between bodies that make no direct contact,
namely noncontact friction, which has been observed in
experiments [13]. Although extremely delicate, noncontact friction dominants in ultrasensitive force detection
experiments. However, the physical mechanism of noncontact friction is still in debate. Several mechanism on
nonconatct friction have been proposed [36], such as dielectric uctuations [3], Ohmic losses caused by uctuating electromagnetic elds [5], friction forces arising from
uctuating thermal elds [6]. In particular, the concept of
quantum friction has been proposed to understand noncontact friction in nanoscale [7,8]. It is known that the
mechanism of quantum friction is due to exchange of moment of photons between the bodies which have a relative motion between each other [7]. As one of the possible
mechanism for noncontact friction, quantum friction was
most widely studied [717].
In 1997, Pendry [7] studied the quantum friction between two perfectly smooth featureless surfaces.
a

e-mail: tbwang@ncu.edu.cn

He pointed out that the existence of friction even at

T = 0 due to vacuum uctuation of electromagnetic eld.
Volokitin and Persson have also made plenty of work in
quantum friction [813]. And they proposed an experimental method which studied the electrical transport phenomena in nonsuspended graphene on amorphous SiO2
substrate to detect quantum friction [14]. Besides quantum friction in translational motion, rotational quantum
frictions have also been studied [1517]. Manjavacas and
Garca de Abajo [15,16] have studied the frictional torque
acting on particles rotating in vacuum, they found that at
absolute zero temperature, the friction in vacuum transfers the mechanical energy into radiation of light, which
will heat the particle. Zhao et al. [17] studied the quantum
friction of a small sphere rotating near a surface. Due to
the enhancement of electromagnetic local density of states,
frictional force near a surface can be several orders of magnitude larger than that for the sphere rotating in vacuum.
Graphite is a natural lubricant material, the friction
properties of which have been studied extensively [1820].
Graphene, a monolayer of graphite, has attracted much
attention due to its electronic [2123], mechanical [24],
and optical properties [2527] in recent years. Additionally, friction characteristics of graphene have also been
investigated [28]. Plasmons can exist at the interface of
graphene and dielectric [29,30], relative motion of two
graphene sheets may cause quantum friction controlled
by plasmons. In this paper, we study the quantum friction between two graphene sheets which are supported
by dielectric substrates. Dependences of quantum friction on temperature, chemical potential, dielectric constant of substrate and the distance between two graphene
sheets have been studied in detail. Friction coecient
(FC) can be enhanced with increasing temperature or

Page 2 of 5

Eur. Phys. J. B (2014) 87: 185

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the quantum friction between

two graphene sheets supported by dielectrics.

dielectric constants of substrate; while FC can be reduced

by increasing chemical potential or distance between two
sheets.

2 Theoretical model
The system studied in this paper is shown in Figure 1, a
supported graphene moves relatively to another supported
graphene which is assumed to be static. The velocity of
the top one is assumed to be v, the distance between
two graphene sheets is D, and the temperature of environment is T . When the velocity satises the condition
v < DkB T /, quantum friction between two graphene
sheets is approximately to f = v, kB is Boltzmann
constant, and  is Planck constant. = rad + evan is
FC, which includes the contributions from propagating
waves and evanescent waves. Contribution from propagating electromagnetic waves for parallel relative motion
is [8,11]




n
rad =
d
8 0

 /c
(1 |R1p |2 )(1 |R2p |2 )

dqq 3
+ [p s],
|1 eik0 D R1p R2p |2
0
(1)
and the contribution from evanescent electromagnetic
waves is [8,11]




n
evan

= 2
d
2 0


Im(R1p )Im(R2p )
dqq 3 e2|k0 |D
+[p s],

2|k0 |D R R |2
|1e
1p 2p
/c
(2)
where
n() =
and

/c

1
,
exp (/kB T ) 1

dqq 3 e2|k0 |D

Im (R1p ) Im(R2p )
|1 e2|k0 |D R1p R2p |2

is called spectral transfer function (STF). q is

the wave vector component parallel to graphene,


k0 = (/c)2 q 2 , and Rip (i = 1, 2) is reection amplitude from surface of graphene for p-polarized waves.
Symbol [p s] stands for terms that are obtained from
the rst two terms by replacing the reection amplitude
Rp for the p-polarized electromagnetic waves with the reection amplitude Rs for the s-polarized electromagnetic
waves.
Graphenes are supported by substrates with dielectrics s . Reection coecients for s- and p-polarization
from surface of graphene are respectively given by the
following formula [25,26]:
Rs =

k0 ks 0
,
k0 + ks + 0

(3a)

Rp =

k0 s ks + (/0 ) k0 ks
,
k0 s + ks + (/0 ) k0 ks

(3b)


where ks =
s (/c)2 q 2 . Optical conductivity ()
which consists of the Drude (intraband) and interband
conductivity can be written respectively as [25,26]


2e2 kB T
i

,
(4a)
D =
ln 2 cosh
+ i 1 2
2kB T



4 G(x) G(/2)
e2
I =
G(/2) + i
dx
,
4
0
()2 4x2
(4b)
where G(x) = sinh(x/kB T )/[cosh(/kB T )+cosh(x/kB T )],
is the chemical potential of the graphene, which is determined by the carrier concentration n0 = (/vF )2 /,
and the density n0 of carrier can be controlled by the
gate voltage, and is the relaxation time which is due
to the losses caused by electron impurity, electron defect,
and electron-phonon scattering.
As has been investigated by Volokitin and Persson in
references [8,11], evanescent wave plays leading role in
the near-eld (2c/  D) regime, so contribution from
propagating wave can be neglected; only equation (2) is
left in the calculation of FC. As has been discussed in reference [31], p-polarization dominates in near-eld regime.
Therefore, only the evanescent waves with p-polarization
are considered in this study.

3 Results and discussion

Plasmons exist and localize strongly at the interface of
graphene and dielectric. When the distance D between
graphene sheets is suciently small, the plasmonic modes
from two graphene sheets can couple together. Figure 2
shows integrand of STF for dierent three chemical potentials, which denotes coupling strength of two graphene
sheets. We can see that the coupling is strongest when two
sheets have the same chemical potentials.
Firstly, the temperature of the environment is xed at
T = 300 K, and the permittivities of substrates are 2.0. FC
can be calculated from equation (2), dependence of FC on

Eur. Phys. J. B (2014) 87: 185

Fig. 2. Integrand of spectral transfer function as functions of

frequency and wave vector component. Chemical potentials of
the top sheet is xed at 1 = 0.5 eV; and 2 = 0.45 eV (a),
2 = 0.5 eV (b), and 2 = 0.55 eV (c), respectively.

distance D for dierent chemical potentials is plotted in

Figure 3a. The solid, dashed, and dotted lines denote the
values of chemical potentials are 0.45, 0.5, and 0.55 eV, respectively. Generally, the values of chemical potentials of
graphene can reach such levels through chemical doping.
As can be seen, FCs decrease as the distance between two
sheets increases for all three dierent . The results can be
easily understood, as the distance increases, the coupling
of the plasmons between two sheets gets weak, so the FC
will decrease. We can also obtain that FC also decreases
as the chemical potential increases for a xed distance in
Figure 3a. In order to understand the relationship between
friction and chemical potential, we display the dependence
of STFs on angular frequency for three dierent chemical
potentials in Figure 3b. STF denotes the correlation of two
surfaces, which stands for the exchange of momentum between the top and bottom graphene sheets. One can see
that STF decreases as chemical potentials increase, which
means that the exchange of momentum from two sheets
are weakened. Therefore, friction between graphene sheets
will decrease as chemical potential increases. Figure 3c

Page 3 of 5

Fig. 3. (a) Friction coecient as a function of distance for

dierent chemical potentials at a xed temperature T = 300 K;
(b) spectral transfer function as a function of angular frequency
for xed D = 10 nm and T = 300 K; (c) dependence of friction
coecient on chemical potential for xed D = 10 nm and T =
300 K.

shows the relationship between FC and chemical potential for a xed distance D = 10 nm. One can see that
FC decreases continuously as chemical potential increases
from 0.01 to 0.55 eV. When chemical potential is small
(0.01 < < 0.1 eV), interband transition dominants, FC
is large and decreases slowly; while when chemical potential becomes large (0.1 < < 0.55 eV), FC decreases very
rapidly as increases.
Figure 4 shows FC as a function of temperature at
xed distance D = 10 nm for dierent chemical potential. FC increases as the temperature increases. The enhancement of temperature will increase the radiation from
graphene sheets, which will lead to increasing of FC. At a
given temperature, FC decreases as the chemical potential
increases, which has the similar property as that in Figure 3a, and the physical mechanism has been discussed
above. The role of temperature in atomic-scale friction

Page 4 of 5

Eur. Phys. J. B (2014) 87: 185

plasmons which is excited at the interface of graphene and

dielectric plays an important role in the quantum friction.
The inuences of distance, temperature, chemical potential and the substrate dielectric constant on FC have been
discussed in detail. Quantum friction can be enhanced by
increasing temperature or substrate dielectric constant,
while can be reduced by increasing distance or chemical
potential. We believe our result is helpful in controlling
quantum friction between objects based on graphene and
in studying mechanism of noncontact friction.

Fig. 4. Friction coecient as a function of temperature for

dierent chemical potentials at a xed D = 10 nm.

This work is supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (2013CB934200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11264029, 11264030,
11304144), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province
(No. 20122BAB212003), and the Nature Science Foundation of
education department of Jiangxi Province (No. GJJ12139).

References

Fig. 5. Friction coecient as a dielectric constants of substrate

for dierent chemical potential.

has been studied [32], the enhancement of temperature

will lead to decrease of friction, which is the so-called
thermolubricity [32]. Therefore, we can obtain that eect
of temperature in quantum friction is dierent from that
in conventional friction.
Besides chemical potential, temperature and distance,
there is another quantity which may impact quantum friction between graphene sheets. The inuence of substrate
dielectric constant on FC for dierent chemical potentials
is displayed in Figure 5. In the calculation, the distance
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constant increases, and FC decreases as chemical potential increase at a certain dielectric constant of substrate.
Compared with that of suspended graphene, plasmons at
the interface of supported graphene is more localized, so
the coupling between two sheets gets stronger as dielectric
constant increases, which will increase the FC.

4 Conclusion
In summary, we have studied the quantum friction between two graphene sheets. In near-eld regime, the

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