Liquid Infiltration at the Nanoscale

(Molecular Dynamics Analysis toward the Understanding of Semiconductor Rinsing)

Abstract

We carried out molecular dynamics simulations of water infiltration into a slit pore for the understanding of the rinsing process of semiconductors, whose minimum length scale seemingly reached the continuum limit. The possibility of water infiltration strongly depended on the wettability, i.e., the sign of the cosine of contact angle due to the large Laplace pressure. The time needed for the infiltration was small due to the high meniscus velocity, and the gas molecules remaining in the slit did not have remarkable effects on this process. Macroscopic relations gave reasonable estimates for these static and dynamic processes even at the nanoscale.