American Physical Society, Physical Review Letters, 7(85), p. 1432-1435, 2000
DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.85.1432
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We investigated experimentally the morphological evolution of thin polydimethylsiloxane films sandwiched between a silicon wafer and different bounding liquids with interfacial tensions varying by 2 orders of magnitude. It is shown that increasing the compatibility between film and bounding liquid by adding a few surfactant molecules results in a faster instability of shorter characteristic wavelength. Inversely, based on the characteristic parameters describing the instability we determined extremely small interfacial tensions with a remarkable accuracy.