Generation of Tubular and Membranous Shape Textures with Curvature Functionals

Tubular and membranous shapes display a wide range of morphologies that are difficult to analyze within a common framework. By generalizing the classical Helfrich energy of biomembranes, we model them as solutions to a curvature optimization problem in which the principal curvatures may play asymmetric roles. We then give a novel phase-field formulation to approximate this geometric problem, and study its Gamma-limsup convergence. This results in an efficient GPU algorithm that we validate on well-known minimizers of the Willmore energy; the software for the implementation of our algorithm is freely available online. Exploring the space of parameters reveals that this comprehensive framework leads to a wide continuum of shape textures. This first step towards a unifying theory will have several implications, in biology for quantifying tubular shapes or designing bio-mimetic scaffolds, but also in computer graphics, materials science, or architecture.

A Li–Yau inequality for the 1-dimensional Willmore energy

By the classical Li–Yau inequality, an immersion of a closed surface in ℝ n {\mathbb{R}^{n}} with Willmore energy below 8 ⁢ π {8\pi} has to be embedded. We discuss analogous results for curves in ℝ 2 {\mathbb{R}^{2}} , involving Euler’s elastic energy and other possible curvature functionals. Additionally, we provide applications to associated gradient flows.