title: Stability of Surface Nanobubbles: A Molecular Dynamics Study.
abstract: The stability and growth or dissolution of a single surface nanobubble on a chemically patterned surface are studied by molecular dynamics simulations of binary mixtures consisting of Lennard-Jones (LJ) particles. Our simulations reveal how pinning of the three-phase contact line on the surface can lead to the stability of the surface nanobubble, provided that the concentration of the dissolved gas is oversaturated. We have performed equilibrium simulations of surface nanobubbles at different gas oversaturation levels ζ > 0. The equilibrium contact angle θeis found to follow the theoretical result of Lohse and Zhang (Phys. Rev. E 2015, 91, 031003(R)), namely, sin θe= ζL/Lc, where L is the pinned length of the footprint and Lc= 4γ/P0is a capillary length scale, where γ is the surface tension and P0is the ambient pressure. For undersaturation ζ < 0 the surface nanobubble dissolves and the dissolution dynamics shows a "stick-jump" behavior of the three-phase contact line.
authors.affiliation: Physics of Fluids, Mesa+ Institute, and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente , P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Shantanu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Maheshwari
authors.affiliation: Physics of Fluids, Mesa+ Institute, and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente , P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van der Hoef
authors.affiliation: Physics of Fluids, Mesa+ Institute, and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente , P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.|Soft Matter and Interfaces Group, School of Engineering, RMIT University , Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia.
authors.forename: Xuehua
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Physics of Fluids, Mesa+ Institute, and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente , P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.|Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization , 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Detlef
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lohse