Stacks of Fluid Membranes under Pressure and Tension

Abstract

Stacks of non-intersecting fluid membranes which are governed by bending rigidity and lateral tension and hold together by an external pressure are studied theoretically using Monte Carlo simulations. Thermal shape fluctuations give rise to an effective repulsion between the individual membranes, which depends sensitively on the relative strength of bending rigidity and lateral tension. For tensionless stacks, the strength of this repulsion is by a factor of two smaller than previously estimated and does not depend on the number of membranes in the stack within the numerical accuracy. For a pair of two membranes, the universal scaling form of this repulsion is determined for varying ratios of the bending rigidity and the surface tension.