Solid-supported lipid multilayers: structure factor and fluctuations.
We present a theoretical description of the thermal fluctuations in a solid-supported stack of lipid bilayers, for the case of vanishing surface tension gamma = 0 and in the framework of continuous smectic elasticity. The model is successfully used to model the reflectivity profile of a thin (16 bilayers) DMPC sample under applied osmotic pressure and the diffuse scattering from a thick (800 bilayers) stack. We compare our model to previously existing theories.
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