2000/07/31 by B. Hu, B. L. Hu, Q. H. Liu +12
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Erythrocyte Function and Pathophysiology #FOS: Physical sciences #Lipid Membrane Structure and Behavior #Nanopore and Nanochannel Transport Studies #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0007489
openalex publication_date 2000/07/31 · arxiv created 2000/08/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Whatever the fluid lipid vesicle is modeled as the spontaneous-curvature, bilayer-coupling, or the area-difference elasticity, and no matter whether a pulling axial force applied at the vesicle poles or not, a universal shape equation presents when the shape has both axisymmetry and up-down symmetry. This equation is a second order nonlinear ordinary differential equation about the sine sinψ(r) of the angle ψ(r) between the tangent of the contour and the radial axis r. However, analytically there is not a generally applicable method to solve it, while numerically the angle ψ(0) can not be obtained unless by tricky extrapolation for r=0 is a singular point of the equation. We report an infinite series representation of the equation, in which the known solutions are some special cases, and a new family of shapes related to the membrane microtubule formation, in which sinψ(0) takes values from 0 to π/2, is given.