Deformation of adhering elastic tubes.

Deformation of an elastic tube adhering onto a substrate due to van der Waals attractive force is investigated by means of numerical minimization and scaling theory. The onset of the deformation is determined by the critical value of Cb/Epsilon N2, where Cb is the bending constant, epsilon is the depth of the van der Waals potential, and N is the size of the tube. For a significantly deformed tube, we found a scaling behavior of the bending energy, which is explained within the shell theory.