Determination of the Strength of Adhesion between Lipid Vesicles

Figure 1

Left: a stable state of the two adhering vesicles obtained by minimization of the energy (3) for the relative volume of each vesicle 𝑣=0.9 and for the dimensionless reduced adhesion constant 𝛾̃=10. The effective contact angle 𝜑_c is defined in the right panel. Right: definition of the effective contact angle. The membrane (shown in gray), has at the contact point the contact curvature 1/𝑅. The secant that defines the effective contact angle 𝜑_c cuts the membrane at the point of contact and at the distance 𝑑 that should be small, that is, 𝑑≪𝑅.