English

On the Plants Leaves Boundary, "Jupe \`a Godets" and Conformal Embeddings

Soft Condensed Matter 2016-08-31 v2 Statistical Mechanics Metric Geometry

Abstract

The stable profile of the boundary of a plant's leaf fluctuating in the direction transversal to the leaf's surface is described in the framework of a model called a "surface \`a godets". It is shown that the information on the profile is encoded in the Jacobian of a conformal mapping (the coefficient of deformation) corresponding to an isometric embedding of a uniform Cayley tree into the 3D Euclidean space. The geometric characteristics of the leaf's boundary (like the perimeter and the height) are calculated. In addition a symbolic language allowing to investigate statistical properties of a "surface \`a godets" with annealed random defects of curvature of density qq is developed. It is found that at q=1q=1 the surface exhibits a phase transition with critical exponent α=1/2\alpha=1/2 from the exponentially growing to the flat structure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0107413,
  title  = {On the Plants Leaves Boundary, "Jupe \`a Godets" and Conformal Embeddings},
  author = {Sergei Nechaev and Raphael Voituriez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0107413},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

17 pages (revtex), 8 eps-figures, to appear in Journal of Physics A