A microscopic model for thin film spreading

Abstract

A microscopic, driven lattice gas model is proposed for the dynamics and spatio-temporal fluctuations of the precursor film observed in spreading experiments. Matter is transported both by holes and particles, and the distribution of each can be described by driven diffusion with a moving boundary. This picture leads to a stochastic partial differential equation for the shape of the boundary, which agrees with the simulations of the lattice gas. Preliminary results for flow in a thermal gradient are discussed.

4 pages, 3 figures. Submitted

References in corpus (1)

• Transients due to instabilities hinder Kardar-Parisi-Zhang scaling: a unified derivation for surface growth by electrochemical and chemical vapor deposition

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