Tetra Point Wetting at the Free Surface of Liquid Ga-Bi

Abstract

A continuous surface wetting transition, pinned to a solid/liquid/liquid/vapor tetra coexistence point, is studied by x-ray reflectivity in liquid Ga-Bi binary alloys. The short-range surface potential is determined from the measured temperature evolution of the wetting film. The thermal fluctuations are shown to be insufficient to induce a noticeable breakdown of mean-field behavior, expected in short-range-interacting systems due to their $d_u=3$ upper critical dimensionality.

4 pages (RevTeX 4), 3 eps figures, submitted to Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (2)

• Templeting of Thin Films Induced by Dewetting on Patterned Surfaces
• Wetting Phase Transition at the Surface of Liquid Ga-Bi alloys: An X-ray Reflectivity Study

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• Atomic-scale surface demixing in a eutectic liquid BiSn alloy
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• Microscopic View on Short-Range Wetting at the Free Surface of the Binary Metallic Liquid Gallium-Bismuth: An X-ray Reflectivity and Square Gradient Theory Study
• Fluid adsorption near an apex: Covariance between complete and critical wetting
• Faraday Instability in a Surface-Frozen Liquid
• Experimental X-Ray Studies of Liquid Surfaces