LINE TENSION AT CONTINUOUS WETTING

The interface displacement model has proven very useful for calculatin g the line tension tau near first-order and continuous (critical or mu lticritical) wetting transitions. Since the upper critical dimension, d(u), for contact line phenomena has been argued to be the same as for surface phenomena at wetting, it follows that d(u) < 3 for intermolec ular forces with algebraic decay. Consequently, the mean-field exponen ts for tau should be exact in d = 3, for most experimentally relevant systems. Here we review the mean-field results for continuous wetting.