Enrichment of surfaces in contact with stable binary mixtures: the case with long-ranged surface fields

Abstract

We consider the experimentally relevant problem of a stable binary mixture in contact with a surface which has a preference for one of the components of the mixture. In particular, we focus on the dynamics of surface enrichment resulting from a surface field turned on at zero time. We analytically solve this problem in the linearized approximation and thereby obtain the asymptotic behavior of various characteristics of the enrichment profiles. Our numerical results indicate that some of the important predictions of linearized theory are valid even in the strongly nonlinear regime.