Boundary-induced nucleation control: a theoretical perspective.

The pre-patterning of a substrate to create energetically more attractive or repulsive regions allows one to generate a variety of structures in physical vapor deposition experiments. A particularly interesting structure is generated if the energetically attractive region forms a rectangular grid. For specific combinations of the particle flux, the substrate temperature and the lattice size it is possible to generate exactly one cluster per cell, giving rise to nucleation control.

Nudged elastic band calculation of the binding potential for liquids at interfaces.

The wetting behavior of a liquid on solid substrates is governed by the nature of the effective interaction between the liquid-gas and the solid-liquid interfaces, which is described by the binding or wetting potential g(h) which is an excess free energy per unit area that depends on the liquid film height h. Given a microscopic theory for the liquid, to determine g(h), one must calculate the free energy for liquid films of any given value of h, i.e.