RT Journal Article
T1 Disjoining Pressure, Healing Distance and Film Height Dependent Surface Tension of Thin Wetting Films
A1 Benet, Jorge
A1 Palanco, José
A1 Sanz García, Eduardo Santiago
A1 MacDowell, Luis
AB In this work we simulate the adsorption of wetting liquid argon films on a model substrate. We calculate the disjoining pressure isotherm and show that it is completely dominated by the long range van der Waals interactions. Thick films exhibit the expected Hamaker power law decay, but a quantitative description of thin films requires consideration of the detailed structure of the adsorbed layer. The spectrum of film height fluctuations is calculated, and shown to provide reliable estimates of the disjoining pressure for all films studied. However, it is observed that the full spectrum can only be reproduced provided that we account for a film height dependent surface tension proportional to the derivative of the disjoining pressure. A simple theory is worked out that describes well the observed film height dependence. Having at hand both the surface tension and the disjoining pressure, we calculate the healing distance of the liquid films, which differs from the classical expectation by a constant of the same order of magnitude as the bulk correlation length. We show these findings have important implications on the behavior of adsorbed liquids and determine corrections to the augmented Young-Laplace equation at the subnanometer length scale.
PB ACS
SN 1932-7447
YR 2014
FD 2014
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/35419
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/35419
LA eng
NO Unión Europea. FP7
NO Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 12 abr 2025