"Close packing of elastic structures":
Abstract:
The folding of leaves in buds, the wing folding of insects in cocoons or DNA packaging in viral capsids or crumpling a piece of paper are different examples of close packed objects. Crumpling and folding are at first sight very different ways of confining low dimensional objects in a small volume: the former one is random and stochastic whereas the latest one is regular and deterministic. Nevertheless, certain similarities exist. Can we describe these systems using an elastic approach and can we determine their statistical properties? I will present different experimental and theoretical studies we made in order to answer these questions.