Entropic pressure between fluctuating membranes in multilayer systems

• 来源期刊: 中国科学:物理学 力学 天文学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2018,（12）
• 页码范围: 95-102
• 页数: 8页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

Gaining insights into the fluctuation-induced entropic pressure between membranes that mediates cell adhesion and signal transduction is of great significance for understanding numerous physiological processes driven by intercellular communication.Although much effort has been directed toward investigating this entropic pressure,there still exists tremendous controversy regarding its quantitative nature,which is of primary interest in biophysics,since Freund challenged the Helfrich's well-accepted results on the distance dependence.In this paper,we have investigated the entropic pressure between fluctuating membranes in multilayer systems under pressure and tension through theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulations.We find that the scaling relations associated with entropic pressure depend strongly on the magnitude of the external pressures in both bending rigidity-and surface tension-dominated regimes.In particular,both theoretical and computational results consistently demonstrate that,in agreement with Helfrich,the entropic pressurep decays with inter-membrane separations c asp～c-3 for the tensionless multilayer systems confined by small external pressures.However,our results suggest that the entropic pressure law follows to bep～c-1 and p～c-3,respectively,in the limit of large and small thermal wavelengths for bending fluctuations of the membranes in a tensionindependent manner for the case of large external pressures.