Interfacial separation between elastic solids with randomly rough surfaces: comparison of experiment with theory.

We study the average separation between an elastic solid and a hard solid, with a nominally flat but randomly rough surface, as a function of the squeezing pressure. We present experimental results for a silicon rubber (PDMS) block with a flat surface squeezed against an asphalt road surface. The theory shows that an effective repulsive pressure acts between the surfaces of the form p∼exp(-u/u(0)), where u is the average separation between the surfaces and u(0) a constant of the order of the root-mean-square roughness, in good agreement with the experimental results.