Paper detail

Instability cascades in crumpling mylar sheets follow a log-Poisson statistic

The process of aging following a hard quench into a glassy state is characterized universally, for a wide class of materials, by logarithmic evolution of state variables and a power-law decay of two-time correlation functions that collapse only for the ratio of those times. This stands in stark contrast with relaxation in equilibrium materials, where time-translational invariance holds. It is by now widely recognized that these aging processes, which ever so slowly relax a complex disordered material after a quench, are facilitated by activated events. Yet, theories often cited to describe such a non-equilibrium process can be shown to miss pertinent aspects that are inherent to many experiments. A case in point are recent experiments on crumpling sheets of mylar loaded by a weight whose acoustic emissions are measured while the material buckles. Using extensive simulations to generate long time-series of such buckling events, we show that crumpling is a log-Poisson process activated by increasingly rare record-sized fluctuations in a slowly stiffening material characterized by a logarithmically growing length-scale. Crumpling thus adds to a range of glassy materials exhibiting the log-Poisson property, which can be used to discriminate between theories.