Up against a wall: interfacial free energies at curved surfaces

Interfacial free energies drive diverse physical phenomena, from wetting and capillarity to dendrite growth in crystal systems. While the interfacial free energy, γ, is largely controlled by the microscopic interactions between different phases, the geometry of the interface also plays a role in tuning the interfacial free energy. Although several analytic theories that try to include these geometric effects on γ have been proposed, experimental and simulation studies of curvature dependence of γ are few. Here we present simulation results for the 2-dimensional hard-disk fluid model at curved, hard, structureless walls and use the simulation results to test the limits of currently available analytical theories for interfacial free energy, including Morphometric Thermodynamics.