Paper_5

Our paper “Stochastic elastohydrodynamics of contact and coarsening during membrane adhesion “(pdf) is now avaliable in Journal of Fluid Mechanics! In this paper we proposed a mathematical model based on the stochastic thin film equation to describe the dynamics of the adhesion of two elastic sheets under the influence of thermal fluctuations. We first looked at the initiation of the adhesion, where two sheets must be brought closer to each other by thermal fluctuations and predicted its average waiting time. We then investigated the coarsening of adhesion patches numerically and interestingly, despite the strong similarity between the stochastic thin film equation and the Cahn–Hilliard equation, we find that the coarsening follows a different power law from that expected under classical Ostwald ripening. A simple scaling argument was provided to explain these observations; however, a more thorough investigation, possibly starting from first principles, is needed to explain the findings rigorously.