Profiles of locally adhering membranes

¹ Department of Materials and Interfaces, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, 76100 Israel
² Department of Physics, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

Received: 14 August 1997
Accepted: 11 September 1997

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.