Publications

Cavitation has been suggested to be a possible source of long range interactions between mesoscopic hydrophobic surfaces. While evaporation is predicted by thermodynamics, little is known about its kinetics. Glauber dynamics Monte Carlo simulations of a lattice gas close to liquid-gas coexistence and confined between partially drying surfaces are used to model the effect of water confinement on the dynamics of surface-induced phase transition. Specifically, they examine how kinetics of induced evaporation change as the texture of hydrophobic surfaces is varied. Evaporation rates are considerably slowed with relatively small amount of hydrophilic coverage. However, the distribution of hydrophilic patches is found to be crucial, with the homogeneous one being much more effective in slowing the formation of vapor tubes which triggers the evaporation process. They estimate the free energy barrier of vapor tube formation via transition state theory, using a constrained forward-backward umbrella sampling technique applied to the metastable, confined liquid. Furthermore, to relate simulation rates to experimental ones, they perform simulations using the mass-conserving Kawasaki algorithm. They predict evaporation time scales that range from hundreds of picoseconds in the case of mesoscopic surfaces {approximately} 10{sup 4} nm{sup 2} to tens of nanoseconds for smaller surfaces {approximately} 40 nm{sup 2}, when the two surfaces are {approximately} 10 solvent layers apart. The present study demonstrates that cavitation is kinetically viable in real systems and should be considered in studies of processes at confined geometry.