Abstract
We show that magnetic bubbles and lipid monolayer bubbles belong to the same family of cellular pattern systems, whose best studied member is the two-dimensional soap froth. We analyse the family resemblances by showing that these systems share the phase space structure of the ideal planar froth. The dynamics of these systems is studied with the goal of seeing how their topological structure might arise and unravel. Monolayer bubbles evolve in time, while magnetic bubbles do not; we show that this is due to a symmetry breaking in the interactions that form the domains. We propose the Gibbs-Thompson effect as responsible for this breaking in monolayers, and show that it induces a dynamics which is, to lowest order, von Neumann's law.