Elasticity and hereditariness

Abstract

This chapter collects the lecture notes of the module “Elasticity and Hereditatiness of Lipid Bilayers” delivered at CISM in July 2016. Such material is based primarily on three papers coauthored by this lecturer, and which have been contributing to shed light on the mechanical behavior of lipid bilayers. In particular, the breakthrough from this research is that the underlying nonlinear elastic response of lipid bilayers is fully determined as long as the membrane energy is obtained. Bending and saddle splay rigidities are shown here to be directly obtainable from the membranal response, as well as the line tension, holding together domains in which lipids are in different phases. The power law hereditariness of lipid membranes strikingly shown through rheometric tests has been analyzed in this work through a suitable energetics obtained by the author and coworkers and penalizing small perturbations of ground configurations of such systems.