"Freezing" of nanoconfined fluids under an electric field.
The problem of the solidlike transition of fluids in a nanogap has drawn much fundamental and practical attention. Here, we directly observed the disappearance of the fluidity of liquids confined within a gap with a surface separation of >10 nm under an EF in a ball-plate system, which is called the "freezing" of liquids. The flow of the nanoconfined liquid became very weak as the EF intensity was increased to a critical value and was correlated with the liquid polarity and the film thickness. It is deduced that the EF can induce more liquid molecules to be aligned to form more ordered layers in the nanogap.
Xie
Guoxin
G
State Key Laboratory of Tribology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Luo
Jianbin
J
Liu
Shuhai
S
Guo
Dan
D
Zhang
Chenhui
C