Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 16: Droplets, Wetting, and Microfluidics (joint session DY/CPP)

DY 16.3: Talk

Monday, March 9, 2026, 15:30–15:45, ZEU/0118

Memory Effects in Contact Line Friction — •Niklas Wolf and Nico van der Vegt — TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

When a drop of liquid comes into contact with a solid surface, it relaxes towards an equilibrium configuration, either wetting the surface or remaining in a droplet-like shape with a finite contact angle. The speed of this relaxation strongly depends on a friction force opposing the movement of the three-phase contact line. In analogy to the treatment of hydrodynamic friction we present an exact method, based on the Mori-Zwanzig formalism, to extract this friction from equilibrium data. Within the linear response regime, we obtain the frequency-dependent dissipative and elastic response of the contact line to an external perturbation, including a frequency-dependent friction coefficient. We find that the contact line exhibits long-lasting memory with a power-law decay due to coupling to the systems hydrodynamic modes. As a result the microscopic contact line dynamics are neither Markovian nor determined by the movement of a few molecules in the vicinity of the contact line.

Keywords: Dynamic Wetting; Contact Line Friction; Memory Effects; Frequency Dependent Friction