Stacks and bunches of fluid membranes

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Abstract
Fluid membranes such as lipid bilayers often form oriented stacks or bunches. Within these bunches, the direct molecular forces are renormalized by thermally excited shape fluctuations. For purely repulsive forces between the membranes, this renormalization depends only weakly on the number N of the membranes within the bunch. In the presence of attractive forces, these bunches undergo continuous unbinding transitions. For freely suspended bunches, all membranes unbind simultaneously at a unique N-independent temperature T*s, but the effective critical behaviour depends on N over many length scales. For bunches that adhere to another surface, the membranes can peel off one after another in a sequence of transitions that occur in a finite temperature range above T*s.