Effective membrane model of the immunological synapse.
The immunological synapse is a patterned collection of different types of receptors and ligands that forms in the intercellular junction between T cells and antigen presenting cells during recognition. The synapse is implicated in information transfer between cells, and is characterized by different spatial patterns of receptors at different stages in the life cycle of T cells. We obtain a minimalist model that captures this experimentally observed phenomenology. A functional renormalization group analysis provides further insights.