Formation of Thin Water Film on Mica Surface (Be patient downloading. It’ll take a couple of minutes.)

This animation derived from real experiments shows the growth of water film on mica surface after cleavage. These are 10 um x 10 um images of thin water film on mica at relative humidity of 75 % and room temperature. Here we used a scanning polarization force microscopy (SPFM) to image dielectric liquid layers. These image show a second monolayer growth after a quick uniform coverage of the first monolayer at high humidity condition (J. Hu, X.-D. Xiao, D. F. Ogletree, and M. Salmeron, Science 268, 267 (1995)). The final thickness of the water film is around 2 Å, that is, one or two molecular layer thick. First the water film form polygonal shaped islands of a few hundred nanometers in size. Then the size increases by the merger neighbor islands and complete coverage of the whole surface after about 90 minutes.

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