Measure of overlap between two arbitrary ellipses on a sphere.

Various packing problems and simulations of hard and soft interacting particles, such as microscopic models of nematic liquid crystals, reduce to calculations of intersections and pair interactions between ellipsoids. When constrained to a spherical surface, curvature and compactness lead to non-trivial behaviour that finds uses in physics, computer science and geometry. A well-known idealized isotropic example is the Tammes problem of finding optimal non-intersecting packings of equal hard disks.

Equilibrium shapes of tubular lipid membranes.

Tubular vesicles represent abundant structural motifs which are observed both in experiments and in nature. We analyse them within the theory of bending elasticity and determine the equilibrium solutions at fixed volume, surface area, and segment length without imposing any specific symmetry or periodicity. We identify four different non-periodic equilibrium shapes.