Multicriticality of Wetting, Prewetting, and Surface Transitions

Nakanishi, Hisao; Fisher, Michael E.

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.49.1565

Cited by 504 publications

(360 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Nakanishi and Fisher studied the "global phase diagram for wall and surface critical phenomena" [30]. Their work was a direct extension of that by Lubensky and Rubin, although leaning towards the context of binary fluid systems in contact with a surface.…”

Section: Simple Fluid Systemsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Fundamentals of Phase Separation in Polymer Blend Thin Films

Coveney¹

2015

Springer Theses

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Section: Simple Fluid Systemsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Fundamentals of Phase Separation in Polymer Blend Thin Films

Coveney¹

2015

Springer Theses

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“…To avoid confusion, here we refer to the thin film phase as the vapor phase and retain the term of film phase for the thick film phase. For the static properties of wetting and prewetting transitions, most of the existing theoretical [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] and experimental [14][15][16][17] investigations have been focused on systems with the simplest geometry-infinite planar surface-and considerably less attention has been paid to systems of other surface geometries, e.g., finite and/or curved surfaces that deviate from the "ideal" case of planar substrate but are familiar in the real world. [18][19][20][21][22][23] For a fluid system in contact with a uniformly curved substrate, such as a cylinder or a sphere, the wetting transition, which would occur at an infinite planar surface, has been shown to be suppressed by the nonzero curvature and the finite size of the substrate, whereas the prewetting transition remains.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to overcome these limitations and/or shortcomings, people have turned to the continuum description of fluid systems by free energy functional, from either the density-functional theory [4][5][6][7]22 or the ͑Landau͒ mean-field theory. [1][2][3]12,13,[18][19][20]23 In this description, the critical nucleus corresponds to a saddle point of the grand potential functional. Some earlier mean-field studies have been focused on systems on infinite planar substrates.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A particular temperature, called the wetting transition temperature, may exist that separates one regime from the other. [1][2][3] The wetting transitions in fluid systems in contact with solid substrates have attracted much attention for decades due to both fundamental theoretical interests and extensive industrial applications ͑e.g., lubrication and adsorption͒. For first-order wetting transitions at two-phase coexistence, it has been predicted that at temperatures/compositions, where the wetting phase is no longer stable in bulk, there exists a first-order transition associated with a finite jump in adsorption, between a "weak" phase of thin film and a "strong" phase of thick film.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Nucleation of wetting films on cylindrical and spherical substrates: A numerical study by the string method

Qiu

Qian

2009

The Journal of Chemical Physics

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Articles you may be interested inNumerical study of the effects of surface topography and chemistry on the wetting transition using the string method J. Chem. Phys. 141, 244705 (2014) Using the mean-field diffuse-interface model for liquid-vapor system and employing the numerical string method, we study the critical nuclei involved in the prewetting transitions on curved substrates. We first introduce three distinct kinds of critical nuclei, namely, the disklike, bandlike, and layerlike ones, which respectively correspond to three possible growth modes of wetting films. We show the disklike growth mode to be the only mode for infinite planar substrates. We then turn to cylindrical and spherical substrates, the two simplest but most important geometries in the real world. We focus on the critical nuclei of finite size, through which the wetting films may be formed with finite thermodynamic probabilities. It is shown that the disklike growth mode is always the most probable for wetting film nucleation and growth as long as a disklike critical nucleus exists. It is also shown that on a cylindrical substrate, the disklike critical nucleus can no longer exist if the substrate radius is smaller than some critical value, comparable to the radius of the disklike critical nucleus on planar substrate. We find that on a cylindrical substrate whose radius is below the critical value, the nucleation and growth of a wetting film can only occur through the bandlike critical nucleus. It is worth emphasizing that the results concerning the bandlike and layerlike growth modes can only be obtained from the diffuse-interface model, beyond the macroscopic description based on the line and surface tensions.

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“…[18][19][20] The water confined inside the film is the wetting phase, while the inner surface between the amphiphilic layers plays the role of the substrate in the usual WT systems. To establish the connection between NBF formation and wetting, we focus on the geometry of the water droplets inside the film, and on the role of the disjoining pressure to control the undersaturation of water with respect to its bulk liquid-vapor coexistence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Newton black films as wetting systems

et al. 2012

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Newton black films (NBFs) can appear under a wide range of experimental conditions. NBFs define the adhesive states of foams and emulsions, showing their formation is a very general physical phenomenon. We show that the existence of NBFs and their whole experimental behavior can be understood within the theory of wetting transitions. NBFs are experimental realizations of partial wetting or pre-wetting states. Hence, they provide experimental systems to investigate the pre-wetting transition, and the spreading behavior under conditions that are very difficult to realize in other experimental systems. We also introduce two new computational approaches to obtain the disjoining pressure isotherm from canonical simulations, and to estimate the contact angles of droplets of nanoscopic dimensions.

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Multicriticality of Wetting, Prewetting, and Surface Transitions

Cited by 504 publications

References 21 publications

Fundamentals of Phase Separation in Polymer Blend Thin Films

Fundamentals of Phase Separation in Polymer Blend Thin Films

Nucleation of wetting films on cylindrical and spherical substrates: A numerical study by the string method

Newton black films as wetting systems

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