Undulated bilayer interfaces in the planar functionalized Cahn-Hilliard equation

Experiments with diblock co-polymer melts display undulated bilayers that emanate from defects such as triple junctions and endcaps, [ 8 ]. Undulated bilayers are characterized by oscillatory perturbations of the bilayer width, which decay on a spatial length scale that is long compared to the bilayer width. We mimic defects within the functionalized Cahn-Hillard free energy by introducing spatially localized inhomogeneities within its parameters. For length parameter \begin{document}$ \varepsilon\ll1 $\end{document} , we show that this induces undulated bilayer solutions whose width perturbations decay on an \begin{document}$ O\!\left( \varepsilon^{-1/2}\right) $\end{document} inner length scale that is long in comparison to the \begin{document}$ O(1) $\end{document} scale that characterizes the bilayer width.