Slippage of Newtonian liquids: influence on the dynamics of dewetting thin films

Slippage of Newtonian liquids in the presence of a solid substrate is a newly found phenomenon, the origin of which is still under debate. In this article, we present a new analysis method to extract the slip length. Enhancing the slip of liquids is an important issue for microfluidic devices that demand for high throughput at low pumping power. We study the velocity of short-chained liquid polystyrene (PS) films dewetting from nonwettable solid substrates. We show how the dynamics of dewetting is influenced by slippage, and we compare the results of two types of substrates that give rise to different slip lengths. As substrates, Si wafers that have been coated with octadecyltrichlorosilane (OTS) or dodecyltrichlorosilane (DTS) were used. Our results demonstrate that the dewetting velocity for PS films on DTS is significantly larger than on OTS and that this difference originates from the different slip lengths of the liquid on top of the two surfaces. For PS films of thickness between 130 and 230 nm, we find slip lengths between 400 nm and 6 microm, depending on substrate and temperature.