Does a polymerized membrane crumple ?

(Received 16 July 1991, accepted 29 July 1991)

Abstract
Evidence for crumpled conformations of polymerized membranes is reported. This is based on Monte Carlo simulations of flexible self-avoiding plaquette surfaces. The radius of gyration R scales with the surfaces area A according to . It is shown that the correlation function between plaquette normals decays rapidly to zero for plaquette membranes, in contrast to hard-sphere membranes exhibiting long ranged strong correlations. The probability distribution of enclosed angles between adjacent plaquettes is discussed with respect to differences between plaquette and hard-sphere membranes.