Profiles of locally adhering membranes

R. Menes , S. A. Safran and D. Kessler

Department of Materials and Interfaces, Weizmann Institute - Rehovot, 76100 Israel
Department of Physics, Bar Ilan University - Ramat Gan, Israel

(received 14 August 1997; accepted 11 September 1997)

PACS. 87.22Bt - Membrane and subcellular physics and structure.
PACS. 82.65Dp - Thermodynamics of surfaces and interfaces.

Abstract:

We show that the local binding of a membrane to another membrane or to a surface has a long-range effect on the membrane profile far from the adhesion site. For systems dominated by long range repulsive interactions between the membranes this results in a linear profile with a small overshooting of the profile in the vicinity of the binding. For systems with only short-range repulsive interactions this results in a logarithmic membrane profile with a maximum slope at the periphery of the adhesion site. Interactions between two such patches are dominated by the membrane's response to pinning and are important in understanding aggregation properties of systems of many pinning sites.

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