Molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) is one of the most broadly utilized solid lubricants with a wide range of applications, including but not limited to those in the aerospace/space industry. Here we present a focused review of solid lubrication with MoS₂ by highlighting its structure, synthesis, applications and the fundamental mechanisms underlying its lubricative properties, together with a discussion of their environmental and temperature dependence. The review also includes an extensive overview of the structure and tribological properties of doped MoS₂, followed by a discussion of potential future research directions.

We present a review of superlubricity: the state of ultra-low friction between surfaces in relative motion. Various approaches to achieving this state are considered in a broad sense, including structural superlubricity, superlubricity via normal force control, and contact actuation, as well as thermolubricity, liquid superlubricity, and quantum lubricity. An overview of the physical fundamentals associated with each approach is presented, with particular emphasis on recent theoretical and experimental developments that constitute milestones in our scientific understanding. The review also includes a discussion of perspectives on future research in the context of existing challenges. It is projected that interest in superlubricity from the basic science and engineering communities will continue to accelerate in the near future, accompanied by a transition from fundamental studies to technologically relevant applications.

Despite its fundamental importance, physical mechanisms that govern friction are poorly understood. While a state of ultra-low friction, termed structural lubricity, is expected for any clean, atomically flat interface consisting of two different materials with incommensurate structures, some associated predictions could only be quantitatively confirmed under ultra-high vacuum (UHV) conditions so far. Here, we report structurally lubric sliding under ambient conditions at mesoscopic (∼4,000–130,000 nm²) interfaces formed by gold islands on graphite. Ab initio calculations reveal that the gold–graphite interface is expected to remain largely free from contaminant molecules, leading to structurally lubric sliding. The experiments reported here demonstrate the potential for practical lubrication schemes for micro- and nano-electromechanical systems, which would mainly rely on an atomic-scale structural mismatch between the slider and substrate components, via the utilization of material systems featuring clean, atomically flat interfaces under ambient conditions.

Friction on few-layer graphene is known to exhibit unique layer dependence where friction measured via atomic force microscopy (AFM) on the nanometer scale is generally observed to decrease with increasing number of layers. However, this trend is not always observed for AFM probe tips with different sizes and for graphene on different substrates. Within this context, the precise role played by the interface, in particular, the size of the contact and substrate roughness, in the layer dependence of friction on graphene is not yet completely understood. Here, we probe the origins of the roughness dependence of layer-dependent friction on graphene by a combination of AFM measurements and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. In the experiments, friction is observed to monotonically decrease with increasing number of graphene layers for tips with various apex radii, while the roughness of the sample surface is observed to decrease. In the simulations, two opposite layer-dependence trends for friction are observed on few-layer graphene on substrates with different roughness values. The underlying mechanisms are investigated using atomistic details obtained from the simulations, where the different friction trends are found to originate from an interplay between surface roughness, the trajectory of the tip, and the number of atoms in contact. Finally, the effect of topographical correlation length on the layer dependence of friction on graphene is discussed.