ABSTRACT
Understanding the effect of confinement on the phase behavior and materials properties of fluids is therefore timely and important from both a fundamental scientific and an applied technological perspective. The development of a host of scanning probe devices such as the atomic force microscope and the surface forces apparatus, on the other hand, enables experimentalists to study almost routinely the behavior of soft condensed matter confined by such substrates to spaces of molecular dimensions. The chapter examines formal and technical aspects of computer simulations. It analyzes the microscopic structure of confined phases for a number of different systems. The chapter describes phase transitions that are unique to phases in confined geometry. An important issue in the thermodynamics of confined fluids concerns their symmetry which is lower than that of a corresponding homogeneous bulk phase because of the presence of the substrate and its inherent atomic structure.
