The Effect of Shear Flow on the Helfrich Interaction in Lyotropic Lamellar Systems

Abstract

We study the effect of shear flow on the entropic Helfrich interaction in lyotropic surfactant smectic fluids. Arguing that flow induces an effective anisotropic surface tension in bilayers due to a combination of intermonolayer friction, bilayer collisions and convection, we calculate the reduction in fluctuations and hence the renormalised change in effective compression modulus and steady-state layer spacing. We demonstrate that non-permeable or slowly permeating membranes can be susceptible to a undulatory instability of the Helfrich-Hurault type, and speculate that such an instability could be one source of a transition to multilamellar vesicles.

14 pages, to appear in Eur Phys J E

References in corpus (1)

• Dynamical Coarse-Graining of Highly Fluctuating Membranes under Shear Flow

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Vorticity Banding During the Lamellar-to-Onion Transition in a Lyotropic Surfactant Solution in Shear Flow
• Helfrich-Hurault elastic instabilities driven by geometrical frustration
• Dynamical Coarse-Graining of Highly Fluctuating Membranes under Shear Flow
• Structure formation of surfactant membranes under shear flow