THE STATES OF TETHERED MEMBRANES

Overview

This document presents various aspects of large-scale molecular-dynamics simulations of a model for tethered membranes.

It contains

• a more extended introduction to this field,
• a collection of abstracts of related publications and
• a gallery with images and animations of visualizations of the simulated membranes.

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the large-scale properties of random surfaces in the context of both field theory and condensed-matter theory. Condensed-matter systems in which surfaces and interfaces play a significant role include microemulsions, lipid bilayers, vesicles, and suspensions of monolayers of exfoliated layered crystals.

An interesting model of random surfaces was introduced (Kantor, Kardar, and Nelson. Phys. Rev. Lett. 57, 791 (1986)), namely, the tethered membrane. In this model, particles (hard spheres of diameter d) are joined in a fixed pattern by flexible tethers of length l. For , the membrane is self-avoiding in that it cannot intersect itself without the overlap of hard spheres. Without further parameters, the properties of this membrane are temperature independent and determined by the entropy.