Critical Casimir forces involving a chemically structured substrate

TL;DR

This paper investigates the critical Casimir forces in a binary liquid mixture confined between a chemically structured wall and a planar surface, using simulations to determine the force's universal scaling behavior near phase transition.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of critical Casimir forces involving chemically patterned substrates, expanding understanding of fluctuation-induced forces in complex geometries.

Findings

Determined the universal scaling function of the critical Casimir force.

Quantified the effect of chemical patterning on force magnitude and direction.

Validated Monte Carlo simulation results with finite-size scaling analysis.

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments with confined binary liquid mixtures near their continous demixing phase transition we study the critical behavior of a system, which belongs to the Ising universality class, for the film geometry with one planar wall chemically structured such that there is a laterally alternating adsorption preference for the species of the binary liquid mixture. By means of Monte Carlo simulations and finite-size scaling analysis we determine the critical Casimir force and the corresponding universal scaling function.