Engineers made a material with almost zero friction that works in normal air, which could lead to machine parts that never wear out.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.15089
The Takeaway
Friction wastes a massive portion of global energy, and most 'super-slippery' states only work in vacuums. By layering 'messy' amorphous materials with crystals, researchers found a way to prevent atoms from ever locking together, maintaining zero friction even in humid air.
From the abstract
Friction dissipates a substantial portion of global energy, motivating the pursuit of superlubricity, a state of near-zero friction, in real-world systems. Conventional approaches rely on crystalline lattice mismatch to suppress periodic energy barriers, but real interfaces invariably contain defects, edges and grain boundaries that restore high-friction states. Here we introduce a materials-agnostic strategy based on amorphous/crystalline heterointerfaces to achieve robust superlubricity under