c coatings.
The finding has still-undetermined technological or biomedical applications, but it offers a way to control the films deformation, including making the fold stick down into or up out of the water, forming a groove.
This groove is controllable, Witten said. You can shape the groove; you can make it come; you can make it go away. One also could control the location of the groove on the film, making it possible to manipulate the film on the scale of a few microns a fraction the width of a human hair.
If there was some other material in the water that was attracted to the surface, we could make it nestle into this shape and we could capture it, Witten explained. We think that this shape could have some potential that people dont realize.
As a next step, Diamant and Witten wonder if the dynamics of swinging pendulums can tell them anything about the dynamics of a folding elastic film. All we have described at the moment is this static shape of the fold, but folding too is a dynamic phenomenon, Witten said.
Squeeze the film, and it will begin to fold after a period of time. Witten and Diamant would like to further describe how that process works based on what the swinging pendulums do.
It seems only natural, but things like that are dangerous and they dont necessarily work, Witten noted. But we do know that there is a lot known about the solitons that we can potentially harness to understand the folds.
Explore further: How a hike led to a math 'Eureka!'
Compression Induced Folding of a Sheet: An Integrable System, by Haim Diamant and Thomas A. Witten, Physical Review Letters, Oct. 14, 2011.