Bogomol'nyi decomposition for vesicles of arbitrary genus

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Abstract
We apply the Bogomol'nyi technique, which is usually invoked in the study of solitons or models with topological invariants, to the case of elastic energy of vesicles. We show that the spontaneous bending contribution caused by any deformation from metastable bending shapes falls into two distinct topological sets: shapes of spherical topology and shapes of non-spherical topology experience respectively a deviatoric bending contribution à la Fischer and a mean curvature bending contribution à la Helfrich. In other words, topology may be considered to describe bending phenomena. Besides, we calculate the bending energy per genus and the bending closure energy regardless of the shape of the vesicle. As an illustration we briefly consider geometrical frustration phenomena experienced by magnetically coated vesicles.

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