English

Interplay of complete wetting, critical adsorption, and capillary condensation

Statistical Mechanics 2015-05-13 v1 Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

The excess adsorption Γ\Gamma in two-dimensional Ising strips (×L)(\infty \times L) subject to identical boundary fields, at both one-dimensional surfaces decaying in the orthogonal direction jj as h1jp-h_1j^{-p}, is studied for various values of pp and along various thermodynamic paths below the critical point by means of the density-matrix renormalization-group method. The crossover behavior between the complete wetting and critical adsorption regimes, occurring in semi-infinite systems, are strongly influenced by confinement effects. Along isotherms T=constT=const the asymptotic power law dependences on the external bulk field, which characterize these two regimes, are undercut by capillary condensation. Along the pseudo first-order phase coexistence line of the strips, which varies with temperature, we find a broad crossover regime where both the thickness of the wetting film and Γ\Gamma increase as function of the reduced temperature τ\tau but do not follow any power law. Above the wetting temperature the order parameter profiles are not slab-like but exhibit wide interfacial variations and pronounced tails. Inter alia, our explicit calculations demonstrate that, contrary to opposite claims by Kroll and Lipowsky [Phys. Rev. B {\bf 28}, 5273 (1983)], for p=2p=2 critical wetting transitions do exist and we determine the corresponding wetting phase diagram in the (h1,T)(h_1,T) plane.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0808.2966,
  title  = {Interplay of complete wetting, critical adsorption, and capillary condensation},
  author = {A. Drzewinski and A. Maciolek and A. Barasinski and S. Dietrich},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0808.2966},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

RevTeX 23 Pages and 17 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. E