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Updated: May 23, 2026

Realistic Membrane Modeling Using Complex Lipid Mixtures in Simulation Studies
Published on: September 1, 2023
Simulating self-organized molecular patterns using interaction-site models
M Balbás Gambra1, C Rohr, K Gruber
1Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics and Center for NanoScience, Fakultät für Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.
Abstract:
Molecular building blocks interacting at the nanoscale organize spontaneously into stable monolayers that display intriguing long-range ordering motifs on the surface of atomic substrates. The patterning process, if appropriately controlled, represents a viable route to manufacture practical nanodevices. With this goal in mind, we seek to capture the salient features of the self-assembly process by means of an interaction-site model. The geometry of the building blocks, the symmetry of the underlying substrate, and the strength and range of interactions encode the self-assembly process. By means of Monte Carlo simulations, we have predicted an ample variety of ordering motifs which nicely reproduce the experimental results. Here, we explore in detail the phase behavior of the system in terms of the temperature and the lattice constant of the underlying substrate.
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