Wetting in a Nutshell - Interfacial phase transitions in non-planar geometries
By: Nelson Bernardino
From: Imperial College, London, UK
At: Complexo Interdisciplinar, Anfiteatro
[2007-01-10]
The wetting transition has been the subject of research for about 30 years but some problems still remain unsolved, most notably the critical wetting transition for short-range interaction at d=3, the upper critical dimension. In the talk we will review some facts about bulk critical phenomena and explore the wetting transition using a simple model, the interfacial model, tracing the story of 30 years of theoretical efforts to explain the results of computer simulations. We end with the description of a recent development, the nonlocal model, that shows that difficulties can be traced back to nonlocal effects in critical wetting and also provides a consistent approach to wetting in non-planar substrates.