Dewetting films: bifurcations and concentrations

Under the influence of long-range attractive and short-range repulsive forc es, thin liquid films rupture and form complex dewetting patterns. This pap er studies this phenomenon in one space dimension within the framework of f ourth-order degenerate parabolic equations of lubrication type. We derive t he global structure of the bifurcation diagram for steady-state solutions. A stability analysis of the solution branches and numerical simulations sug gest coarsening occurs. Furthermore, we study the behaviour of solutions in the limit that short-range repulsive forces are neglected. Both asymptotic analysis and numerical experiments show that this limit can concentrate ma ss in delta -distributions.