Viscoelastic relaxation of bilayer lipid membranes: II. Temperature dependence of relaxation time.

Recent studies have demonstrated the high frequency exponential relaxation of a viscoelastic modulus of lipid membranes. It is shown that the temperature dependence of the relaxation time can be extracted from published data on the relevant modulus for solvent-free bilayer lipid membranes of glycerol monoöleate. The relaxation is fastest close to the membrane transition temperature, where the time scale is approximately 20 mus. Possible causes of the transitional minimum of this time scale are discussed.