Helfrich Chiral The Promotion Of The Theory Of Elasticity And The Theory Of The Polymer Helix Bistable Explained

In Polymer, helix is a quite universal configuration Recent experiments show thatsome polymers such as bacterial flagellar filaments can form bistable helices in ionsolutions, which means that left handed helix and right handed helix can coexist in thesame environment The mechanism of this phenomenon has not been explainedsatisfactorily.Helfrich proposed a fourth order chiral elastic string theory which explained thepreference of helix over the straight line, we examine the same problem by means ofstability and results support Helfrich's treatment .Because of the difliculty in interpretationof bistable helices in fourth order theory, we generalized this theory to eighth order.Fortunately, we found that the fifth order theory suffices to explain the existence of thebistable helices.