Basketball shoes on a gym floor, bicycle brakes in need of a tune-up, or the squeal of tires are everyday examples of squeaking sounds. Such sounds have long been attributed to stick-slip friction, or ...

1.1 What is friction? Take this everyday example: when a coffee mug rests on a flat table, the kinetic frictional force is zero. There is no force trying to move the mug across the table, so there is ...

Friction is created when two surfaces slide one on top of the other. Since this consumes additional energy, this so-called sliding friction is considered an irksome yet inevitable aspect of dynamic ...

Nanomachines will depend on our knowledge of friction, heat transfer and energy dissipation at the atomic level for their very survival. In the scramble to revolutionize the world with nanotechnology ...

Researchers have demonstrated how to entirely suppress static friction between two surfaces. This means that even a minuscule force suffices to set objects in motion. Especially in micromechanical ...

Probably everyone is familiar with the phenomenon: water drops cling to a pane of glass, if it is tilted out of the horizontal plane. Only when a certain angle is reached they slide off. This raises ...

Friction is an intrinsic physical phenomenon to curling. Without it, objects in motion would move endlessly, without slowing down. This would cause many safety-related problems: Cars or trains could ...