Bifurcation of Cylinders for Wetting and Dewetting Models with Striped Geometry

Abstract

We show that some pieces of cylinders bounded by two parallel straight lines bifurcate in a family of periodic nonrotational surfaces with constant mean curvature and with the same boundary conditions. These cylinders are initial interfaces in a problem of microscale range modeling the morphologies that adopt a liquid deposited in a chemically structured substrate with striped geometry or a liquid contained in a right wedge with Dirichlet and capillary boundary condition on the edges of the wedge. Experiments show that starting from these cylinders and once a certain stage is reached, the shape of the liquid changes drastically in an abrupt manner. Studying the stability of such cylinders, the paper provides a mathematical proof of the existence of these new interfaces obtained in experiments. The analysis is based on the theory of bifurcation by simple eigenvalues of Crandall and Rabinowitz.