How Narrow Can a Meniscus Be?
- 24 February 2004
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 92 (8), 085504
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.92.085504
Abstract
A water meniscus naturally forms in air between an atomic force microscope (AFM) tip and a substrate. This nanoscale meniscus produces a capillary force on the AFM, and also serves as a molecular transport channel in dip-pen nanolithography (DPN). A stable meniscus is a necessary condition for DPN and for the validity of the Kelvin equation commonly applied to AFM experiments. Lattice gas Monte Carlo simulations show that, due to thermal fluctuation, a stable meniscus has a lower limit in width. We find a minimum width of 5 molecular diameters (1.9 nm) when the tip becomes atomically sharp (terminated by a single atom).This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit:
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