Figure 5.

Forces on an isolated red cell nearby a segmented assembly for the case where both attractive and repulsive forces are spring-like. (a) Red arrow indicates repulsive, like, force; blue arrows indicate attractive, unlike, forces. These latter forces can overcome homotypic repulsion and additionally stabilize the isolated cell against vertical fluctuations. (b) Plot of the potential energy nearby a 2D striped array in the vertical (tan) plane of a. The hatched red and blue cylinders indicate locations of fixed cells in the striped array. The blue well indicated is attractive to an isolated red cell, whereas the red barrier shown is repulsive to it. (c) Enlarged view of well and barrier including a plot (black) of the potential along the y = 0 line of symmetry. In b and c, the negative of the potential is plotted for simplicity of interpretation: this causes negative slopes to be leftward and positive slopes to be rightward. (d) Small curvature discotic surface (cyan in a) tends to repel the isolated like cell more strongly than (e) higher curvature surface. At higher curvature, weaker repulsion is produced because some neighboring cells are further than d_max away from the isolated cell (green arrows indicate forces released from cells further than d_max away).