ABSTRACT
Various packing problems and simulations of hard and soft interacting particles, such as microscopic models of nematic liquid crystals, reduce to calculations of intersections and pair interactions between ellipsoids. When constrained to a spherical surface, curvature and compactness lead to non-trivial behaviour that finds uses in physics, computer science and geometry. A well-known idealized isotropic example is the Tammes problem of finding optimal non-intersecting packings of equal hard disks. The anisotropic case of elliptic particles remains, on the other hand, comparatively unexplored. We develop an algorithm to detect collisions between ellipses constrained to the two-dimensional surface of a sphere based on a solution of an eigenvalue problem. We investigate and discuss topologically distinct ways two ellipses may touch or intersect on a sphere, and define a contact function that can be used for construction of short- and long-range pair potentials.
ABSTRACT
Tubular vesicles represent abundant structural motifs which are observed both in experiments and in nature. We analyse them within the theory of bending elasticity and determine the equilibrium solutions at fixed volume, surface area, and segment length without imposing any specific symmetry or periodicity. We identify four different non-periodic equilibrium shapes. Depending on the precise value of the constraints or the corresponding Lagrange multipliers, these four shapes include: (i) snake-like and (ii) helical structures, (iii) tubes with a spherical body, and (iv) tubes with a discoidal body. However different in the details, all of the shapes have the same general cylindrical morphology which is either globally modulated or is a superposition of an additional structural motif and the cylinder. These results point to a great significance of the circular cylindrical shape and offer a comprehensive and general analysis of the shape of tubular vesicles.
