As an element, carbon is rather unique and offers a range of rare opportunities for the design
and fabrication of zero-, one-, two-, and three-dimensional nanostructured novel materials
and coatings such as fullerenes, nanotubes, thin films, and free-standing nano-to-macroscale
structures. Among these, carbon-based two-dimensional thin films (such as diamond and
diamond-like carbon (DLC)) have attracted an overwhelming interest in recent years,
mainly because of their exceptional physical, chemical, mechanical, electrical, and
tribological properties. In particular, certain DLC films were found to provide extremely
low friction and wear coefficients to sliding metallic and ceramic surfaces. Since the early
1990s, carbon has been used at Argonne National Laboratory to synthesize a class of novel
DLC films that now provide friction and wear coefficients as low as 0.001 and
10−11–10−10 mm3 N−1 m−1, respectively, when tested in inert or vacuum test environments. Over the years, we
have optimized these films and applied them successfully to all kinds of metallic
and ceramic substrates and evaluated their friction and wear properties under a
wide range of sliding conditions. In this paper, we will provide details of our
recent work on the deposition, characterization, and tribological applications
of near-frictionless carbon films on glass and ceramic substrates. We will also
provide chemical and structural information about these films and describe the
fundamental tribological mechanisms that control their unusual friction and wear
behaviour.