termination of the summation. It is obvious that with increasing path length the influence of the termination point becomes less and less important for the calculation of the average. In the quasi aperiodic case, where a short path length would only sample fractions of the energy landscape, it is evident that the friction force only converges for sufficiently long paths.

Both $F^{(1)}$ and $F^{(2)}$ lead to an exponential friction law, however, the calculated values of the Derjaguin-offset $F_0$ and the COF $\mu$, while showing the same trend, differ slightly (see Tab. \[tab:coefficients\]). However, this is not surprising given the two different approaches, see equations (\[eq:F1\]) and (\[eq:F2\]). Plotting both friction forces versus load curves for a given sliding path, one finds that $F^{(1)}$ and $F^{(2)}$ do agree well in the low to medium load regime while for loads larger than $L=\unit[150]{pN}$ higher deviations occur, as seen in Fig. \[fig:6\]. We attribute this discrepancy to the increasing influence of the reaction forces for large loads which are not considered in the calculation of $F^{(1)}$, but play a role in the dissipation mechanism and hence enter implicitly in $F^{(2)}$.

![Friction forces $F^{(1)}$ (green circles) and $F^{(2)}$ (green crosses) versus load $L$ for 