A crumpled piece of paper is a familiar everyday object for most people, especially for anyone doing research. In addition to their role as graves for failed theories and ideas, the shape of crumpled papers and their networks of creases hold many mysteries. In our group we are mostly interested in the dynamics of the crumpling process; understanding how the shape of a crumpled sheet at any given time will determine its crumpled shape in the future.
Additionally, a crumpled sheet of paper displays a plethora of intriguing macroscopic mechanical properties, which it shares with many other disordered and glassy systems, such as slow relaxation and non-monotonic aging. We combine our observations of the internal structure of crumpled sheets with experiments probing their macroscopic behavior as part of a greater effort done in our group to understand the way in which microscopic disorder is tied to complex phenomena observed across a wide range of disordered systems.
