Dynamic wetting with two competing adsorbates

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamic wetting behavior with two competing, repelling adsorbates on a substrate, revealing phase transitions, droplet formation, and symmetry breaking through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a model for wetting with two competing adsorbates, analyzing phase transitions, droplet dynamics, and symmetry breaking phenomena in 2+1 dimensions.

Findings

Formation of homogeneous droplets separated by pinned regions

Slow coarsening in the wet phase

Emergence of a continuous phase transition with symmetry breaking

Abstract

We study the dynamic properties of a model for wetting with two competing adsorbates on a planar substrate. The two species of particles have identical properties and repel each other. Starting with a flat interface one observes the formation of homogeneous droplets of the respective type separated by nonwet regions where the interface remains pinned. The wet phase is characterized by slow coarsening of competing droplets. Moreover, in 2+1 dimensions an additional line of continuous phase transition emerges in the bound phase, which separates an unordered phase from an ordered one. The symmetry under interchange of the particle types is spontaneously broken in this region and finite systems exhibit two metastable states, each dominated by one of the species. The critical properties of this transition are analyzed by numeric simulations.