We present a theoretical description of the thermal fluctuations in a solid-supported stack of lipid bilayers, for the case of vanishing surface tension γ=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.
@article{arxiv.1504.02260,
title = {Solid-supported lipid multilayers: Structure factor and fluctuations},
author = {Doru Constantin and Ulrike Mennicke and Chenghao Li and Tim Salditt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.02260},
year = {2015}
}