Every surface though appears smooth at macro scale has roughness in micro scales which can be measured by a profilometer. The wetting liquid between contacting rough surfaces develops a sub-ambient pressure inside itself, which forces the surfaces toward more intimate contact. Since the pressure drop across the liquid is proportional to the curvature at the free surface and this curvature, in turn, is approximately inversely proportional to the local spacing, the thinner the liquid bridge, the greater is the pull effect.
where:
*  are the liquid-solid contact angles for the lower and upper surfaces, respectively,
*  is the gap between the two solids at the location of the free surface of the liquid.
These tensile stresses put the two surfaces into more contact while the compressive stresses due to the elastic deformation of the surfaces tend to resist them. 
Two scenarios could happen in this case: 1. The tensile and compressive stresses come into balance which in this case the gap between the two surfaces is in the order of Surface roughness|roughness of the surfaces, or, 2. The tensile stresses overcome the compressive stresses and the two surfaces come into near complete contact in which gap between surfaces is a small fraction of the Surface roughness|surface roughness. The latter case is the reason for failure of most microscale devices. An estimate of the tensile stresses exerted by the capillary film can be obtained by dividing the adhesion force, , between two surfaces to the area wetted by the liquid film, . Because for relative smooth surfaces, the magnitude of the capillary pressure is predicted to be large, it is anticipated that the capillary pressures will be of large magnitude. A lot of works have been done to ascertain whether there may be some practical limit  to the development of such negative pressures (e.g. ).