Estimation of the bending rigidity and spontaneous curvature of fluid membranes in simulations.

Several numerical methods for measuring the bending rigidity and the spontaneous curvature of fluid membranes are studied using two types of meshless membrane models. The bending rigidity is estimated from the thermal undulations of planar and tubular membranes and the axial force of tubular membranes. We found a large dependence of its estimate value from the thermal undulation analysis on the upper-cutoff frequency q(cut) of the least-squares fit. The inverse power-spectrum fit with an extrapolation to q(cut)→0 yields the smallest estimation error among the investigated methods. The spontaneous curvature is estimated from the axial force of tubular membranes and the average curvature of bent membrane strips. The results of these methods show good agreement with each other.