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Updated: Jun 5, 2026

High-Speed Magnetic Tweezers for Nanomechanical Measurements on Force-Sensitive Elements
Published on: May 12, 2023
Gigantic maximum of nanoscale noncontact friction
Kohta Saitoh1, Kenichi Hayashi, Yoshiyuki Shibayama
1Department of Physics, Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, Yokohama 223-8522, Japan.
Abstract:
We report measurements of noncontact friction between surfaces of NbSe2 and SrTiO3 and a sharp Pt-Ir tip that is oscillated laterally by a quartz tuning fork cantilever. At 4.2 K, the friction coefficients on both the metallic and insulating materials show a giant maximum at the tip-surface distance of several nanometers. The maximum is strongly correlated with an increase in the spring constant of the cantilever. These features can be understood phenomenologically by a distance-dependent relaxation mechanism with distributed time scales.
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