Abstract
The essential features of lipid molecule interactions responsible for the ripple phase in lecithin bilayers are identified and incorporated into a general statistical mechanical model. As a first approximation, the model is reduced to the axial next-nearest neighbor Ising (ANNNI) model. This model exhibits an intermediate ripple phase, over a narrow temperature range, between a high-temperature (chain melted) disordered phase and a low-temperature (chain tilted) ordered phase. In this way the ripples are found to arise from an interplay between the attractive van der Waals forces and the action of the headgroup to hinder level packing of the lipid molecules.
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