@Article{CiCP-21-40,
author = {Michael Mikucki and Yongcheng Zhou},
title = {Fast Simulation of Lipid Vesicle Deformation Using Spherical Harmonic Approximation},
journal = {Communications in Computational Physics},
year = {2018},
volume = {21},
number = {1},
pages = {40--64},
abstract = {<p style="text-align: justify;">Lipid vesicles appear ubiquitously in biological systems. Understanding
how the mechanical and intermolecular interactions deform vesicle membranes is a
fundamental question in biophysics. In this article we develop a fast algorithm to
compute the surface configurations of lipid vesicles by introducing surface harmonic
functions to approximate the membrane surface. This parameterization allows an analytical
computation of the membrane curvature energy and its gradient for the efficient
minimization of the curvature energy using a nonlinear conjugate gradient method.
Our approach drastically reduces the degrees of freedom for approximating the membrane
surfaces compared to the previously developed finite element and finite difference
methods. Vesicle deformations with a reduced volume larger than 0.65 can be
well approximated by using as small as 49 surface harmonic functions. The method
thus has a great potential to reduce the computational expense of tracking multiple
vesicles which deform for their interaction with external fields.</p>},
issn = {1991-7120},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.4208/cicp.OA-2015-0029},
url = {http://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/cicp/11231.html}
}