Surface Effects On Wetting and Layering Transitions

Abstract

Wetting phenomena plays an interesting role in the technological development of materials. Recently, much attention has been directed to the study of magnetic solid films. To understand, theoretically, the effect of surface on wetting and layering transitions in these systems, we will give in this chapter a presentation of several relevant recent theoretical works realized on wetting and layering transitions in which we explain how the nature of surface can affect the behavior of wetting and layering transitions. Using different spin systems models and different numerical and approximate methods such as mean field and effective field theories, real space renormalization group technique, transfer matrix method and Monte-Carlo simulations, it is found that the wetting and layering transitions depend on the nature of the surface magnetic field, the surface coupling strength, the surface crystal field, the geometry of surface, the in-homogeneity of substrate and the quantum fluctuations at the surface�