Wetting of a symmetrical binary fluid mixture on a wall.

We study the wetting behavior of a symmetrical binary fluid below the demixing temperature at a nonselective attractive wall. Although it demixes in the bulk, a sufficiently thin liquid film remains mixed. On approaching liquid vapor coexistence, however, the thickness of the liquid film increases and it may demix and then wet the substrate. We show that the wetting properties are determined by an interplay of the two length scales related to the density and the composition fluctuations. The problem is analyzed within the framework of a generic two component Ginzburg-Landau functional (appropriate for systems with short-ranged interactions). This functional is minimized both numerically and analytically within a piecewise parabolic potential approximation. A number of surface transitions are found, including first-order demixing and prewetting, continuous demixing, a tricritical point connecting the two regimes, or a critical end point beyond which the prewetting line separates a strongly and a weakly demixed film. Our results are supported by detailed Monte Carlo simulations of a symmetrical binary Lennard-Jones fluid at an attractive wall.

• Publication year

  2000

• Venue

  Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics

• Publication date

  2000-07-18

• Fields of study

  Materials Science, Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevE.63.031201arXiv cond-mat/0007298PMID 11308636
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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