An energy landscape based approach for studying supercooled liquid and glassy thin films
Abstract
Materials in confined spaces are important in science and technology. Examples include biological fluids in membranes, liquids trapped in porous rocks, and thin-film materials used in high-resolution patterning technologies. However, few reliable rules exist to predict how the properties of materials will be affected by thin-film confinement. We have recently shown that the potential energy landscape formalism can be used to study, by both theory [1] and simulation [2], how the behavior of thin-film materials depends on sample dimensions and film-substrate interactions. Our landscape-based mean-field theory [1] can be used to study both the thermodynamic properties and the ideal glass transition of thin films. It predicts that, in the case of neutral or repulsive walls, the ideal glass transition temperature is lowered by decreasing film thickness. This is in qualitative agreement with experimental trends for the kinetic glass transition in confined fluids. Landscape-based approaches are also valuable for understanding the structural and mechanical properties of thin-film glasses. We demonstrate how the concept of an "equation of state of the energy landscape" [3] can be generalized to thin films [1, 2], where it gives insights into potential molecular mechanisms of tensile strength. [1] T. M. Truskett and V. Ganesan, J. Chem. Phys. 119, 1897-1900(2003); J. Mittal, P. Shah and T. M. Truskett, to be submitted to Langmuir. [2] P. Shah and T. M. Truskett, to be submitted to J. Phys. Chem. B. [3] S. Sastry, P. G. Debenedetti and F. H. Stillinger, Phys. Rev. E 56, 5533 (1997)
- Publication:
-
APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 2004
- Bibcode:
- 2004APS..MARP35010S