Spheres and Prolate and Oblate Ellipsoids from an Analytical Solution of Spontaneous Curvature Fluid Membrane Model

An analytic solution for Helfrich spontaneous curvature membrane model (H. Naito, M.Okuda and Ou-Yang Zhong-Can, Phys. Rev. E {\bf 48}, 2304 (1993); {\bf 54}, 2816 (1996)), which has a conspicuous feature of representing the circular biconcave shape, is studied. Results show that the solution in fact describes a family of shapes, which can be classified as: i) the flat plane (trivial case), ii) the sphere, iii) the prolate ellipsoid, iv) the capped cylinder, v) the oblate ellipsoid, vi) the circular biconcave shape, vii) the self-intersecting inverted circular biconcave shape, and viii) the self-intersecting nodoidlike cylinder. Among the closed shapes (ii)-(vii), a circular biconcave shape is the one with the minimum of local curvature energy.