Surface Phase Diagrams for Wetting on Heterogenous Substrates

Abstract

We propose a simplified description of fluid adsorption on heterogenenous micropatterned substrates. Using this approach, we are able to rederive results obtained earlier using effective interfacial Hamiltonian methods and predict a number of new examples of surface phase behaviour for both singly and periodically striped substrates. In particular, we show that, for a singly striped system, the manner in which the locus of surface unbending phase transitions approaches the pre-wetting line of the infinite pure system, in the limit of large stripe widths, is non-trivial and sensitive to several characteristic lengthscales and competing free-energies. For periodic substrates, we investigate finite-size deviations from Cassie's law for the wetting temperature of the heterogeneous system when the domain sizes are mesoscopic.