Reprint of ''Tribological behavior of monocrystalline silicon from single- to multiple-asperity scratch''

During producing silicon surface and fabricating silicon devices, the machining, cutting and milling from nanoscale to macroscale are accomplished with friction and wear under single- and multiple-asperity contact. In the present study, the scratch tests on silicon surface under single- and multiple-asperity contact were contrastively investigated, and the transition and correlation between different contact modes were addressed. When surface wear (formation of groove or protrusive hillock) appears under single-asperity sliding on silicon, the friction force became load-controlled and increased linearly with the normal load. The transition of single-asperity to multiple-asperity scratch was observed with the increase in the applied normal force. Under the multiple-asperity condition, surface hillocks were created on the scratched area, which were detected only under single-asperity test before. This study will shed new light on the understanding of multi-scale processing of silicon surface, and provide new insight for enriching tribology theory.