International Workshop and Conference on: Statistical Physics Approaches to Multi-disciplinary Problems

January 07 – 13, 2008, IIT Guwahati, India

Spinodal Dewetting of Thin Films

P. K. Jaiswal and S. Puri
School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 110067

email: prabhat.jnu@gmail.com

Stable thin liquid films are of various scientific and technological applications, e.g., in optical coating,
manufacturing photographic films, painting technologies, forming dielectric layers, coating thin wires and
fibers, lubricants, adhesives, etc. Generally these films are used to improve or modify the surface
characteristics of a material and to protect it from the external atmosphere. However, the instabilities in a thin
film may lead to rupture, hole formation, and other morphological changes which amplify the nonuniformity in
the thin film [1]. This morphological evolution in an unstable thin film is generally known as ‘dewetting’ [2].
There have recently been a number of theoretical and experimental studies on dewetting in thin films [3-6]. The
process of ‘spinodal dewetting’ comes into the category of a general class of phenomena, spinodal
decomposition [7] for example, in which thermal fluctuations are amplified. There is a characteristic mode out
of the modes of these amplified fluctuations, which grows fastest and dominate the emerging dewetting pattern.
The pattern formation taking place during dewetting can also be of great importance in nanotechnology, with
the possibility of designing patterned surfaces for specific applications, e.g., for preparing quantum dots [8],
nanorings [9], etc.
We numerically solve the nonlinear two-dimensional thin film equation [2] for a thin liquid film subjected
to the long range van der Waals attraction and short range Born repulsion. The simulation results for the
temporal evolution of domains and height profile along diagonal direction of the lattice show the ‘hills and
valleys’ structure which is the typical morphology obtained during the spinodal dewetting [10]. We obtain the
dynamical correlation function and structure factor showing the existence of a characteristic length scale in the
system at late time. We give the scaling arguments for the length scale of the drops to be proportional to t1/3
which is in agreement with our numerical results for the domain growth.

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