Critical and multicritical wetting phenomena in systems with long-range forces

Abstract

We study wetting transitions and phase diagrams in systems with long-range (van der Waals) interactions, finding novel types of multicritical behavior including tricritical and fourth-order critical wetting. Both a lattice-gas model, solved in the mean-field approximation, and a Landau theory are used. A simple procedure which could render all of the transitions experimentally accessible is proposed.