Undulated Bilayer Interfaces in the Planar Functionalized Cahn-Hilliard Equation

Abstract

Experiments with diblock co-polymer melts display undulated bilayers that emanate from defects such as triple junctions and endcaps, \cite{batesjain_2004}. Undulated bilayers are characterized by oscillatory perturbations of the bilayer width, which decay on a spatial length scale that is long compared to the bilayer width. We mimic defects within the functionalized Cahn-Hillard free energy by introducing spatially localized inhomogeneities within its parameters. For length parameter $\epsilon \ll 1$, we show that this induces undulated bilayer solutions whose width perturbations decay on an $O\left({\epsilon }^{-1/2}\right)$ inner length scale that is long in comparison to the $O(1)$ scale that characterizes the bilayer width.