The thermal Casimir effect in lipid bilayer tubules

Abstract

We calculate the thermal Casimir effect for a dielectric tube of radius $R$ and thickness delta formed from a membrane in water. The method uses a field-theoretic approach in the grand canonical ensemble. The leading contribution to the Casimir free energy behaves as -k_BTL kappa_C/R giving rise to an attractive force which tends to contract the tube. We find that kappa_C ~ 0.3 for the case of typical lipid membrane t-tubules. We conclude that except in the case of a very soft membrane this force is insufficient to stabilize such tubes against the bending stress which tends to increase the radius.

4 pages no figures RevTex

References in corpus (1)

• The Casimir effect: Recent controversies and progress

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The effects of dielectric disorder on van der Waals interactions in slab geometries
• Path integrals for stiff polymers applied to membrane physics
• Spicules and the effect of rigid rods on enclosing membrane tubes
• Thermal Casimir effect with soft boundary conditions
• Some observations on the renormalization of membrane rigidity by long-range interactions
• Numerical methods for fluctuation driven interactions between dielectrics