  The molecular self-assembly of various structures such as micelles and
vesicles has been the subject of comprehensive studies. Recently, a new
approach to design these structures, the frame-guided assembly, has been
developed to progress towards fabrics of predefined shape and size, following
an initially provided frame of guiding elements. Here we study frame-guided
assembly into a two-dimensional membrane via computer simulations, based on a
single-bead coarse grained surfactant model in continuous space. In agreement
with the experiment the assembly process already starts for surfactant
concentrations below the critical micelle concentration. Furthermore, upon
decreasing temperature the formation process gets more localized. Additionally,
we consider a lattice gas model of the membrane plane including guiding
elements where the particle concentration is varied via a chemical potential.
It behaves similar to the continuous model and additionally allows the
formulation of analytical mean-field predictions which provide a fundamental
understanding of frame-guided assembly.
