Shape transitions in soft spheres regulated by elasticity

Soft core shell structures abound in nature. Examples of these structures, comprised of a thin outer membrane bounding an elastic core, include raisins, gel-filled vesicles, and a variety of membrane-bound organelles in the cell. We study the elasticity-driven morphological transitions of spherical core shell structures when either their surface area is increased or their interior volume is decreased. We demonstrate a transition, which is related to the Euler buckling, from the spherical initial shape to a lower symmetry one. We discuss the dependence of the critical excess surface area (relative to that of a bounding sphere) for buckling, the internal stresses in the core, and the symmetry of the buckled state on the elastic parameters of the system. We compare these predictions to a variety of observed morphological transitions in hard and soft materials, and discuss extensions of this work to growing viscoelastic media.