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Unpublished Paper
Pore Formation in Fluctuating Membranes
Journal of Chemical Physics (2005)
  • Oded Farago
  • Christian Santangelo
Abstract

We study the nucleation of a single pore in a fluctuating lipid membrane, specifically taking into account the membrane fluctuations, as well as the shape fluctuations of the pore. For large enough pores, the nucleationfree energy is well-described by shifts in the effective membrane surface tension and the pore line tension. Using our framework, we derive the stability criteria for the various pore formation regimes. In addition to the well-known large-tension regime from the classical nucleation theory of pores, we also find a low-tension regime in which the effective line and surface tensions can change sign from their bare values. The latter scenario takes place at sufficiently high temperatures, where the opening of a stable pore of finite size is entropically favorable.

Disciplines
Publication Date
2005
Comments
Prepublished version downloaded from ArXiv. Published version is located at http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jcp/122/4/10.1063/1.1835952
Citation Information
Oded Farago and Christian Santangelo. "Pore Formation in Fluctuating Membranes" Journal of Chemical Physics (2005)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/christian_santangelo/25/