Figure 1.

(a) Illustration of our model. Each particle corresponds to a fragment of lipid bilayer, comprised of a central hydrophobic core and two surrounding hydrophilic layers. The unit vector ${\hat{\mathbf{d}}}_i$ specifies the orientation of particle i. Also shown are the spatial regions used to compute the numbers of equatorial (enclosed by dashed line) and polar (enclosed by dotted line) neighbors of particle i. (b) Random initial configuration for a trajectory of N=864 particles. As time progresses, particles quickly form two-dimensional patches that continue to coarsen. Shown are snapshots after (c) 100 and (d) 1000 Monte Carlo sweeps.