2007/03/13 by F. de los Santos, Francisco de los Santos, E. Romera +4
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Material Dynamics and Properties #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.75.031105
published as Physical Review E 75, 031105 (2007) · 11 pages, 2 figures
openalex publication_date 2007/03/13 · arxiv created 2007/03/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.