Crumpling paper

May 19,1998. This document dates back to the early days of the web, back when we our pages were "Enhanced for Netscape 2.0", everybody had to have a background to be "cool", and you had to have a link to IBM's home page so people would know where to find it. This isn't the most popular document we own, but we like the content so we'll keep it forever.

A while back I spent a great deal of time crumpling paper. Why, you might ask? Well, it turns out that many of the systems that physicists are interested in emit pulses of energy that vary broadly in energy with a power law distribution: a few examples are earthquakes, magnets and noise pulses emitted by materials under stress. Crumpling paper puts a world of interesting physics between your hands.

If your browser supports Java, you can read my paper in the original LaTeX form without any plug-ins or helper applications thanks to the IDVI applet by Garth Dickie from the Geometry Center.

States of an inextensible (paper) sheet
Why physicists like Power laws
Some other systems that show similar behavior.
Crumpling by the traditional hand method
The new cylindrical method
Recording digital audio
Crumpling vs. Hand, the results.
Crumpling triangular grids.

Publications and Talks

My paper Acoustic Emission from crumpling paper was published in Phys. Rev. E 54 278 (1996). You can read the abstract, or read the whole paper.
An article about my work and similar work done by other people was in the 15 July 1996 issue of Science News.
I gave a talk about crumpling at the March Meeting of the APS; the talk abstract is available in DVI, PostScript, and HTML.

Related works

Magnets produce Barkhausen noise, a magnetic signal similar to the sound produced by crumpling. I've written a java applet that simulates hysteresis in magnetic systems.
Eric Kramer and Alex Lobkovsky. have pages devoted to their work in crumpling; both experimental acoustic work like my own and also theoretical simulations. They've written a paper titled Universal Power Law in the Noise from a Crumpled Elastic Sheet which you can read in HTML, or compressed PostScript form.
The Visualization Lab at IBM's Almaden research center has an excellent presentation on the states of tethered membranes, including animations of crumpling transitions.

Co-conspirators and collaborators

Jim Sethna was a co-author of my paper and supervised this research.
Naresh Kannan and I talked alot about crumpling, and Naresh helped me drag my computer up to the anechoic chamber because he has a car.
I also talked with Olga Perkokic and Karin Dahmen, and conversations with Eric Kramer suggested the idea of weak crumpling to us.
This research was funded by the Department of Energy (grant DE-FG02-88-ER45364), and the National Science Foundation. (grant DMR-9419506)