Crumpled wires and Liouville field theory

Abstract

The study of the packing of a length of wire in the elastic phase in a two-dimensional domain is done using techniques of conformal maps. An analogy is drawn between this system and the 2D gravity - or Liouville field theory - coupled to a massive point particle in two dimensions. The resulting scaling properties for the stored elastic energy and the number of loops is derived and compared with existing data from experiments and simulations. © 2009 Europhysics Letters Association.