Capillary Drops on Rough Surfaces

I will talk about a liquid drop sitting on a rough surface at equilibrium, which is formulated as a volume-constrained minimizer of the total interfacial energy.

The large-scale shape of such a drop strongly depends on the micro-structure of the solid surface. Surface roughness enhances wetting and de-wetting properties of the surface, altering the equilibrium contact angle between the drop and the surface. Our goal is to understand the shape of the drop with fixed small scale roughness. We will discuss existing literature, our result, and some open questions.