Wear Resistance Limited by Step Edge Failure: The Rise and Fall of Graphene as an Atomically Thin Lubricating Material

Owing to its intrinsically lubricious property, graphene has a high potential to be an atomically thin solid lubricant for sliding interfaces. Despite its ultrahigh breaking strength at the nanoscale, graphene often fails to maintain its integrity when subjected to macroscale tribological tests. To reveal the true wear characteristics of graphene, a nanoscale diamond tip was used to scratch monolayer graphene mechanically exfoliated to SiO2...