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Updated: Aug 6, 2026

Optimized Fabrication Procedure for High-Quality Graphene-based Moiré Superlattice Devices
Published on: July 11, 2025
Tunable Friction with Nonmonotonic Enhancement via Interlayer Rotation-Induced Moiré Superlattices
Yun Dong1, Yifeng Zhang1, Chunjie Zhang1
1School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou730050, China.
Abstract:
Friction has both beneficial and detrimental effects in practical systems. Therefore, the objective of friction regulation extends beyond merely pursuing ultralubrication. In this work, we construct a friction model consisting of a monolayer MoS2 tip and a mutually rotating bilayer MoS2 substrate. It is found that friction exhibits a nonmonotonic increase with the rotation angle, and when the tip size is equal to the period of the rotation-induced moiré superlattice or its half, friction peaks appear. Further analysis, combined with changes in the atomic contact quantity, contact quality, and surface roughness caused by the moiré superlattices, reveals that the atomic-level contact behavior, phonon coupling, and topographic features jointly contribute to the nonmonotonic variations in friction. Additionally, the intrinsic mechanisms underlying the regulation of friction by interlayer interactions within the substrate and tip-substrate coupling are clarified. This paper provides a novel method for controlling friction by considering the tip size and the interlayer rotation mode of induced moiré superlattices.
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