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Updated: Jul 15, 2026

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Critical wetting of a class of nonequilibrium interfaces: a mean-field picture
Francisco de Los Santos1, Elvira Romera, Omar Al Hammal
1Departamento de Electromagnetismo y Física de la Materia, Universidad de Granada, Fuentenueva s/n, 18071 Granada, Spain.
Abstract:
A self-consistent mean-field method is used to study critical wetting transitions under nonequilibrium conditions by analyzing Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) interfaces in the presence of a bounding substrate. In the case of positive KPZ nonlinearity a single (Gaussian) regime is found. On the contrary, interfaces corresponding to negative nonlinearities lead to three different regimes of critical behavior for the surface order parameter: (i) a trivial Gaussian regime, (ii) a weak-fluctuation regime with a trivially located critical point and nontrivial exponents, and (iii) a highly nontrivial strong-fluctuation regime, for which we provide a full solution by finding the zeros of parabolic-cylinder functions. These analytical results are also verified by solving numerically the self-consistent equation in each case. Analogies with and differences from equilibrium critical wetting as well as nonequilibrium complete wetting are also discussed.
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