Membrane compression in tumbling and vacillating-breathing regimes for quasispherical vesicles

We derive some analytical results of a well-known model for quasispherical vesicles in a linear shear flow at low deformability. Attention is focussed on the oscillatory regimes: the tumbling (TB) mode, vacillating-breathing (VB) mode, and the transition from vacillating-breathing to tumbling, depending on a control parameter Γ. It is shown that, during the VB-to-TB transition (Γ=1), the vesicle momentarily attains its maximal extension in the vorticity direction and transits through a circular profile in the shear plane for which the radius is exactly determined. In addition, we provide an explicit analytical expression for the effective membrane tension for different types of motions. We find a critical bending number below which the membrane undergoes compression at each instant and show that, during the VB-to-TB transition, a fourth-order membrane deformation is possible.