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Influence of salt on membrane rigidity of neu-tral DOPC vesicles

Salt is a very common molecule in aqueous environments but the question of whether the interactions of monovalent ions Na^+ and Cl^- ,with the neutral heads of phospholipids are impactful enough to change the membrane rigidity is still a mystery. To provide a resolution to this long simmering debate, we investigated the dynamics of DOPC vesicles in the fluid phase with increasing external salt concentration. At higher salt concentrations, we observe an increase in bending rigidity from neutron spin echo spectroscopy (NSE) and an increase in bilayer thickness from small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). We compared different models to distinguish membrane undulations, lipid tail motions and the translational diffusion of the vesicles. All the models indicate an increase in bending rigidity by a factor of 1.3 to 3.6. We demonstrate that even for t > 10 ns, and for Q > 0.07 1/Å the observed NSE relaxation spectra is clearly influenced by the translational diffusion of the vesicles. For t < 5 ns, the lipid tail motions dominate the intermediate dynamic structure factor. As the salt concentration increases this contribution diminishes. We introduced a new time-dependent analysis for the bending rigidity that highlights only a limited Zilman-Granek time window where the rigidity is physically meaningful.