Effect of Thermal Undulations on the Bending Elasticity and Spontaneous Curvature of Fluid Membranes

Effective bending moduli of a fluid membrane are investigated by means of the transfer-matrix method developed in our preceding paper. This method allows us to survey various statistical measures for the partition sum. The role of the statistical measures is arousing much attention, since Pinnow and Helfrich claimed that under a suitable statistical measure, that is, the local mean curvature, the fluid membranes are stiffened, rather than softened, by thermal undulations. In ...

Several numerical methods for measuring the bending rigidity and the spontaneous curvature of fluid membranes are studied using two types of meshless membrane models. The bending rigidity is estimated from the thermal undulations of planar and tubular membranes and the axial force of tubular membranes. We found a large dependence of its estimate value from the thermal undulation analysis on the upper-cutoff frequency q_{cut} of the least squares fit. The inverse power-spectru...

We study the effects of thermal fluctuations on symmetric tensionless heterogeneous (two-component) fluid membranes in a simple minimal model. Close to the critical point $T_c$ of the associated miscibility phase transition of the composition and for sufficiently strong curvature-composition interactions, mediated through a composition-dependent bending modulus, thermal fluctuations lead to enhancement of the effective bending modulus. Thus, the membrane conformation fluctuat...

It has been considered that the effective bending rigidity of fluid membranes should be reduced by thermal undulations. However, recent thorough investigation by Pinnow and Helfrich revealed significance of measure factors for the partition sum. Accepting the local curvature as a statistical measure, they found that fluid membranes are stiffened macroscopically. In order to examine this remarkable idea, we performed extensive ab initio simulations for a fluid membrane. We set...

Biological membranes are able to exhibit various morphology due to the fluidity of the lipid molecules within the monolayers. The shape transformation of membranes has been well described by the classical Helfrich theory, which consists only a few phenomenological parameters, including the mean and the Gaussian curvature modulus. Though various methods have been proposed to measure the mean curvature modulus, determination of the Gaussian curvature modulus remains difficult b...

A method to calculate the bending rigidity $\kappa$, saddle-splay modulus $\bar{\kappa}$, and spontaneous curvature $C_0$ of a fluid membrane is proposed. Virtual work for the bending deformations into cylindrical and spherical shapes is calculated for a flat membrane. This method does not require a force decomposition, unlike the existing stress-profile method. The first derivative of the deformation gives $\kappa C_0$ and is a discrete form of the first moment of the stress...

We consider membranes as fluid deformable surface and allow for higher order geometric terms in the bending energy. The evolution equations are derived and numerically solved using surface finite elements. The higher order geometric terms related to the Gaussian curvature squared have a tendency to stabilize tubes and enhance the evolution towards equilibrium shapes, thereby facilitating rapid shape changes. This is demonstrated in axisymmetric settings and fully three-dimens...

Elastic curvature constants determine many structural and functional properties of fluid membranes. Methods to measure the mean curvature modulus have proved to be robust. In contrast, Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic property of a surface. Thus, measuring the relevant modulus $\bar{k}$ in fluid membranes remains a challenging task. Inspired from colloidal "crenellated disks" observed in a model system composed of hard rods, we propose a concise relation between the two cur...

The theory of irreversible thermodynamics for arbitrarily curved lipid membranes is presented here. The coupling between elastic bending and irreversible processes such as intra-membrane lipid flow, intra-membrane phase transitions, and protein binding and diffusion is studied. The forms of the entropy production for the irreversible processes are obtained, and the corresponding thermodynamic forces and fluxes are identified. Employing the linear irreversible thermodynamic fr...

We calculate the fluctuation spectrum of the shape of a lipid vesicle or cell exposed to a nonthermal source of noise. In particular we take into account constraints on the membrane area and the volume of fluid that it encapsulates when obtaining expressions for the dependency of the membrane tension on the noise. We then investigate three possible origins of the non-thermal noise taken from the literature: A direct force, which models an external medium pushing on the membra...