From curvature instabilities to Casimir forces in membranes
Prof. Jean-Baptiste Fournier (U. Paris Diderot)

The talk will cover the two subjects mentioned in the title. Frist, I will describe and model an instability of membranes that occurs when a local dilation of one monolayer is induced by, say, a chemical agent. This instability was discovered experimentally by M. Angelova, N. Puff and N. Khalifat. A curvature instability followed by the ejection of a tubule occurs. A dynamical model involving the friction between the two monolayers will be presented. Second, I will outline a very recent calculation with A.-F. Bitbol from which we have derived the fluctuation of the Casimir force between two inclusions. We find that the latter is much larger than the (average) Casimir force and that it increases with the separation d between the inclusions as -1/d^2.