You’ve heard of superconductivity, but have  you heard of its cousin superlubricity?  

Superconductivity means zero electric resistance.  Superlubricity means zero friction. Sounds like  

an advert for a frying pan, but it’s much bigger  than this. Imagine the ultimately smooth surface  

and how that would change the world! Ok, I know  it’s hard to imagine, but give me a few minutes  

and I’ll try to explain why it’d be big. And  also what’s behind the recent headlines claiming  

that a research group in China “achieved  near-zero friction on macroscopic scales.”

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Friction is everywhere, all the time. Friction  is why we can walk and why cars can drive, it’s  

why you can lift a glass and write with a pen.  Without friction your muscles wouldn’t contract  

and your blood wouldn’t properly clump. Friction  is part of our life, whether we want that or not.

But just like electrical resistance, friction  wastes a lot of energy: Every time a motor turns,  

every time a fridge pumps cooling liquid,  every time a turbine makes another turn,  

friction creates heat, which wastes energy.  And it’s not just the direct loss of energy  

during operation, it’s also that friction causes  wear, which means you must replace parts. Gears,  

pistons, fans, all these gradually wear down.  For engineers, friction can be a headache.

It’s not just engineering. A remarkable example  for what a difference low friction materials  

can make comes from the swimming competition of  the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. That year, several  

contestants came with new high-tech swimsuits,  made from ultra-smooth water repellent fabric,  

rather than traditional swimwear material. These  suits were designed to significantly reduce  

friction with the water. That in return decreased  turbulence and saved the swimmers energy,  

so they could move faster. 23 world records  fell because of this! After lots of debate,  

the international swimming federation  banned the suits for most competitions.

I honestly found that very disappointing  because for me the technological advances  

that help athletes run faster, jump higher, or  hit stronger, are as remarkable as the rest of  

their performance. But fine, no super suits.  Let’s return to engineering and the new paper.

The authors have shown that it is  possible to make two solid objects  

slide past each other with almost no friction.  The material they used isn’t anything fancy,  

it’s graphite, the same stuff that pencils use.  Graphite is made of many extremely thin sheets  

stacked on top of each other. Those sheets  can slide easily, which is why pencils work. 

The authors of the new paper grew very pure  graphite crystals with almost no defects.  

Then they peeled off flakes that are about  a tenth of a millimetre wide. And those,  

they showed, slid over each other with  almost zero friction. The reason this  

didn’t work previously was simply that it’s  difficult to grow the graphite purely enough.

You might say, ok, but a tenth of a millimetre  isn’t exactly large. Well for one thing,  

that is quite large for microscopic devices.  It’s also much larger than for previous  

demonstrations. You might also remember  the superconductor experiments that were  

literally working with tiny crumbs.  So this is at a similar lab level.

Their no-friction material has a peculiar feature  though which is that the friction depends on how  

the atomic lattices in the two surfaces are  aligned. For some angles friction is low,  

for some it is high. This might come  in useful for some applications but  

it’s still not the universal no  friction coat we’re hoping for.

This, of course, is not the only recent  development in frictionless research,  

I am just using this paper as an excuse  to tell you something about this. There  

are other groups working on other  materials, and not just on that,  

but also on how to make those materials  more durable and easier to produce.

It’s easy to underestimate this sort of  research, but this isn’t a niche interest.  

Low friction coatings are a billion dollar market,  

and the market is projected to  almost double in the next 10 years.

I know that this isn’t the sort of sexy  fundamental physics breakthrough that people  

seem to be drawn to, but I think that material  science is one of the most underrated research  

areas. You don’t have to take my word for it, if  you look at what artificial intelligence startups  

want to do in research, material science is  at the top of the list. Why? It’s because  

there is a quiet revolution in material design  that most of the world is entirely missing.

And the people who work on those  startups understand that there  

is a lot of money to make there. It’s not  just surface coatings to reduce friction,  

it’s better electrical or optical  behaviour, self-healing cracks,  

intelligent responses to temperature or  pressure change, and so on. Not flashy.

Just world-changing, slowly, without  drama and with very little friction.

Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.