Hydration force fluctuations in hydrophilic planar systems

Utilizing all-atom simulations with explicit solvent, the authors model hydrophilic surfaces interacting across water at a fixed chemical potential. They extract the hydration forces acting between the surfaces and assess force fluctuations as well as interlamellar water number fluctuations. The trends obtained from the simulations are captured by a continuum-based description with effective model parameters. The significance of fluctuations depends on surface hydrophilicity and rigidity. The authors show that the force fluctuations play an important role in kinetic processes in systems with lateral sizes smaller than several tens of nanometers. (C) 2016 American Vacuum Society.