Wetting of geometrically structured surfaces

We review recent experiments on the growth of cryogenic fluids adsorbed on various substrates structured in different ways. On a very well defined array of microscopic linear wedges sculpted on thin Si wafers, the film mass is found to diverge as a power law in the chemical potential difference from saturation with an exponent x = -1.96 +/- 0.10, in very good agreement with recent scaling analysis results. For the other, more irregular patterns, the observed exponents range from -0.95 to -2. In any case, they are always much smaller than those found for flat or rough surfaces.