We are pleased to announce a seminar talk by Prof. Elliot Fried who is visiting us at the MBI.

The seminar is on Dec 7th (Wed) at 4.30 pm, T Lab Level 5 seminar room. If you are interested to speak to him before the seminar please feel free to write to me (<s.dasgupta@fz-juelich.de>) or Jeff (mbijr@nus.edu.sg)

Shape transitions in some systems involving surface and line energy

We will present a variational problem for finding energetically preferred equilibrium configurations of a system consisting of a closed, inextensible, unshearable loop endowed with elastic resistance to bending that is spanned by a liquid film endowed with constant surface tension. Aside from presenting results from bifurcation and stability analyses based on the first and second variations of the relevant energy functional, we will discuss generalizations of the problem. In particular, we will describe the consequences of incorporating elastic resistance to twisting the bounding loop and bending the spanning film. We will also mention applications to experiments involving discoidal high-density lipoprotein particles and synthetic nanodiscs.