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Line tension and wetting of chemically inhomogeneous substrates
Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)
Аннотация
Within the effective interfacial Hamiltonian approach we evaluate the excess line free energy associated with liquid layer adsorbed on a planar substrate containing stripe-like chemical inhomogeneity. In the case of short-range intermolecular forces the interfacial morphology and the corresponding expression for the line tension - which includes the inhomogeneity finite width effects - are derived and discussed as functions of temperature and inhomogeneity width. In particular, the width-dependent contributions to the line tension change their structure at the stripe wetting temperature $T_W1$: for $T<T_W1$ they decay exponentially while for $T>T_W1$ the decay is algebraic. This behavior is similar to the Casimir effect in confined fluids at their bulk critical temperature. The influence of interfacial fluctuations on the problem of existence and properties of line tension is discussed.
Bibliography
1. The influence of inhomogeneous substrate's curvature on line tension,
P. Jakubczyk and M.Napiorkowski, Phys. Rev. E 72, 011603 (2005).
2. Point tension in adsorption at a chemically inhomogeneous substrate in two
dimensions, P. Jakubczyk, M. Napiorkowski and A.O. Parry, Phys. Rev. E 74, 031608 (2006).
3. Interfacial morphology and correlations in adsorption at a chemically structured substrate - exact results in d = 2, P. Jakubczyk and M.Napiorkowski, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 40, 2263 (2007).
