We demonstrate a method to fabricate ultra-thin, ultra-smooth and low-loss silver (Ag) films using a very thin germanium (Ge) layer as a wetting material and a rapid post-annealing treatment. The addition of a Ge wetting layer greatly reduces the surface roughness of Ag films deposited on a glass substrate by electron-beam evaporation. The percolation threshold of Ag films and the minimal thick...

The wetting properties of solid substrates with customary (i.e., macroscopic) random roughness are considered as a function of the microscopic contact angle of the wetting liquid and its partial pressure in the surrounding gas phase. Analytic expressions are derived which allow for any given lateral correlation function and height distribution of the roughness to calculate the wetting phase dia...

Keywords: Multi-mesh Adaptive finite element Wetting and spreading Precursor film Diffuse-interface model a b s t r a c t Using the phase-field model for immiscible two-phase flows, we have numerically investigated the wetting dynamics. The long-range van der Waals forces towards the solid, which drive the spreading of the wetting phase into the nonwetting phase, have been explicitly taken into...

– Transfer-matrix results in 2D show that wetting of a rough, self-affine wall induced by bulk bond disorder turns discontinuous as soon as the wall roughness exponent ζW exceeds ζ0 = 2/3, the spatial anisotropy index of interface fluctuations in the bulk. For ζW < 2/3 critical wetting is recovered, in the same universality class as for the flat-wall case. These and related findings suggest a f...

As a canonical model for wetting far from thermal equilibrium we study a Kardar-Parisi-Zhang interface growing on top of a hard-core substrate. Depending on the average growth velocity the model exhibits a non-equilibrium wetting transition which is characterized by an additional surface critical exponent θ. Simulating the single-step model in one spatial dimension we provide accurate numerical...

Gas microsensors based on columnar zinc oxide structures (rods and needles) with different aspect ratios and wetting properties are developed via aerosol-assisted chemical vapor deposition. The correlation between their wetting properties and degree of humidity-interference in gas sensing is presented. Gas sensing tests of these systems to hydrogen demonstrate noticeable lower humidity-interfer...

The wetting of thin Ag films on Cu 111 is characterized in detail with angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. After constructing disordered Ag films on Cu 111 , we monitored the evolution of their layer-resolved Shockley states during wetting. Our results provide the first observation of a transitional state, which implies a coexistence of clean Cu 111 , 1 ML of Ag on Cu 111 , and 2 ML of A...

The possibility of wetting phase transitions in Bose-Einstein condensed gases is predicted on the basis of Gross-Pitaevskii theory. The surface of a binary mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates can undergo a first-order wetting phase transition upon varying the interparticle interactions, using, e.g., Feshbach resonances. Interesting ultra-low-temperature effects shape the wetting phase diagram....

Forty four children with daytime wetting were included in a randomly controlled trial of two alarm devices, a contingent one that sounded when wetting occurred and a non-contingent one that went off from time to time unrelated to wetting events. A quota allocation system ensured comparability between treatment groups. Two thirds responded to an alarm by becoming dry. The non-contingent alarm pr...

We present a theoretical investigation of the temperature and electric field dependence of nematic liquid crystal wetting layers close to an aligning substrate within a confined system. Using a mesoscopic Q tensor theory coupled to Maxwell’s equations for the electric field, we consider the existence and stability of homogeneous nematic wetting layers close to the substrate. Numerical results a...