Moving droplets: The measurement of contact lines

Contact lines are the locations where a gas, liquid and a solid meet. From everyday experience we know that such contact lines can be mobile, for example in the case of a water droplet sliding over a glass surface. However, the continuum description of the flow towards or away from a contact line implies that the forces diverge as one approaches...

Nanoscale contact line visualization based on total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy

We describe a novel measurement method to study the contact line of a droplet at nanoscale level. The method is based on Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Microscopy (TIRFM), which uses an evanescent excitation field produced by total internal reflection of light. The evanescent field depends on the angle of the incident light and has an...