Structure formation in thin liquid films: Interface forces unleashed

We present a conclusive overview of the stability conditions and the dewetting scenarios of thin liquid coatings. The stability of thin films is given by the effective interface potential phi(h) of the system and depends among other parameters on the film thickness h. In the case of unstable or metastable films holes will appear in the formerly uniform layer and the film dewets the substrate. We describe the analysis of emerging hole patterns and how to distinguish between different dewetting scenarios. From this analysis we derive the effective interface potential for our particular system, phi(h), which agrees quantitatively with what is computed from the optical properties of the system. Our studies on thin polystyrene films on Si wafers of variable Si oxide layer thickness demonstrate that the assumption of additivity of dispersion potentials in multilayer systems yields good results and are also in accordance with recent numerical simulations.