Wetting phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and play key functions in various industrial processes and products. When a gas bubble encounters an oil droplet in an aqueous medium, it can experience either partial wetting or complete engulfment by the oil. Each of these morphologies can have practical benefits, and controlling the morphology is desirable for applications ranging from particle synt...

Waterproof and self-cleaning surfaces continue to attract much attention as they can be instrumental in various different technologies. Such surfaces are typically rough, allowing liquids to contact only the outermost tops of their asperities, with air being entrapped underneath. The formed solid-liquid-air interface is metastable and, hence, can be forced into a completely wetted solid surface...

In recent experiments, a sequence of changes in the wetting state (‘wetting transitions’) has been observed upon increasing the temperature in systems consisting of pentane on pure water and of hexane on brine. In this sequentialwetting scenario, there occurs a first-order transition from a partial-wetting state, in which only a microscopically thin film of adsorbate is present on the substrate...

Although common in biological systems, synthetic self-assembly routes to complex 3D photonic structures with tailored degrees of disorder remain elusive. Here we show how liquids can be used to finely control disorder in porous 3D photonic crystals, leading to complex and hierarchical geometries. In these optofluidic crystals, dynamically tunable disorder is superimposed onto the periodic optic...

We examined the formation of a multiply curved meniscus inside rectangular nanochannels, whose width ranges from 50 to 800 nm at a constant height of 200 nm. When the channel width is smaller than approximately 400 nm under partial wetting conditions, a distinct multi-curvature meniscus was observed at the advancing front with an edge disjoined from the wall. In contrast, a typical pre-wetting ...