Motion of Elastic Thin Films by Evaporation-Condensation in the Dewetting Regime

TL;DR

This paper proves short-time existence of solutions for a model describing the dewetting of thin elastic films driven by evaporation-condensation, incorporating moving contact lines and epitaxial strain effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel variational model with moving contact lines for solid state dewetting via evaporation-condensation, extending previous models to include these features.

Findings

Established short-time existence of solutions

Developed a variational model with moving contact lines

Incorporated epitaxial strain effects into the evolution law

Abstract

In this work, we show the short-time existence of solutions of the evolution equations that represent the solid state dewetting of thin films through evaporation-condensation as a two dimensional sharp interface variational model. The evolution law is established as the $L^2$ gradient flow of surface energies in the presence of epitaxial strain. The main novelty is the presence of moving contact lines when the film formation is governed by the evaporation-condensation method.