Effective free energy for pinned membranes

We consider membranes adhered through specific receptor-ligand bonds. Thermal undulations of the membrane induce effective interactions between adhesion sites. We derive an upper bound to the free energy that is independent of interaction details. To lowest order in a systematic expansion we obtain two-body interactions which allow to map the free energy onto a lattice gas with constant density. The induced interactions alone are not strong enough to lead to a condensation of individual adhesion sites. A measure of the thermal roughness is shown to depend on the inverse square root of the density of adhesion sites, which is in good agreement with previous computer simulations.

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