Irreversible growth of a binary mixture confined in a thin film geometry with competing walls

TL;DR

This paper investigates the irreversible growth of a binary mixture in a confined thin film with competing walls, revealing complex interface transitions and multicritical wetting behavior under far-from-equilibrium conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of interface localization-delocalization and growth mode transitions in a three-dimensional confined binary mixture.

Findings

Interface between species localizes or delocalizes along the growth direction.

A multicritical wetting point where the interface is nearly flat.

The growing interface transitions between concave and convex modes.

Abstract

The irreversible growth of a binary mixture under far-from-equilibrium conditions is studied in three-dimensional confined geometries of size $L_x \times L_y \times L_z$, where $L_z \gg L_x = L_y$ is the growing direction. A competing situation where two opposite surfaces prefer different species of the mixture is analyzed. Due to this antisymmetric condition an interface between the different species develops along the growing direction. Such interface undergoes a localization-delocalization transition that is the precursor of a wetting transition in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, the growing interface also undergoes a concave-convex transition in the growth mode. So, the system exhibits a multicritical wetting point where the growing interface is almost flat and the interface between species is essentially localized at the center of the film.