Interfacial Phenomena at Nanoscopically Heterogenous Surfaces

There is a lot of unambiguous experimental evidence that modification of solid surfaces may dramatically alter the structure and phase behaviour of the ambient fluid. It is already well known that geometrical or chemical modification of solid surfaces can induce completely new types of phase transitions and critical phenomena, related to but distinct from wetting occurring at planar (and ideally smooth) surfaces. Using methods of statistical mechanics (Density Functional Theory, Effective Hamiltonian Models, Scaling,…) we endeavour to capture the essential physics of these phenomena and understand the subtle interplay between the surface geometry, molecular interactions, interfacial fluctuations and measureable characteristics of the system (such as adsorption). Our main focus is on surfaces whose heterogeneity is characterized by a nanoscopically small length-scale, a research area which is still in its infancy and revealing a number of counter-intuitive phenomena that cannot be captured by standard tools. Beside its theoretical importance, the research has also tight connections with modern nanotechnologies dealing with fabrication of functional materials or for a development of devices controlling flows of extremely tiny volumes of liquid, such as “lab-on-a-chip”.