Abstract
Thermal shape fluctuations of stearoyl-oleoyl-phosphatidylcholine (SOPC) vesicles are studied using video microscopy. Herein, we show experimentally that the dynamics of GUV fluctuations clearly involves two relaxation processes, in agreement with theoretical predictions. This demonstrates that intermonolayer friction is an important phenomenon for the relaxation processes of fluctuating bilayers. We further discuss our data in the light of two existing theoretical approaches describing the dynamics of quasi-spherical fluctuating vesicles. However, our results do not permit to favor one approach over the other. Nonetheless, from our data we estimate the intermonolayer friction coefficient for SOPC bilayers to be within the interval 5 × 108Ns/m3 and 5 × 109Ns/m3, which is somewhat larger than previously published values using a different technique.
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