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Confined Multilamellae Prefer Cylindrical Morphology

Jung-Ren Huang·Ling-Nan Zou·Thomas A. Witten
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Abstract

By evaporating a drop of lipid dispersion we generate the myelin morphology often seen in dissolving surfactant powders. We explain these puzzling nonequilibrium structures using a geometric argument: The bilayer repeat spacing increases and thus the repulsion between bilayers decreases when a multilamellar disk is converted into a myelin without gain or loss of material and with number of bilayers unchanged. Sufficient reduction in bilayer repulsion can compensate for the cost in curvature energy, leading to a net stability of the myelin structure. A numerical estimate predicts the degree of dehydration required to favor myelin structures over flat lamellae.

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Jung-Ren Huang, Ling-Nan Zou, Thomas A. Witten. 2005-06-17. Confined Multilamellae Prefer Cylindrical Morphology. https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0506422

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