Pore Stability and Dynamics in Polymer Membranes

Vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers exhibit a wide diversity of behavior upon electroporation, due to competitions between edge, surface and bending energies that drive the system, while different viscous dissipation mechanisms determine the timescales. These effects are manifestations of the varying membrane thickness d from what are essentially chemically identical molecules. For smaller d, we find large unstable pores and the resulting membrane fragments reassemble into vesicles within minutes. Vesicles with larger d form long-lived pores of nanometer dimension that could be potentially useful for sieving applications and drug delivery.