Smooth cascade of wrinkles at the edge of a floating elastic film
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Updated: Jun 8, 2026

Fabrication of Large-area Free-standing Ultrathin Polymer Films
Published on: June 3, 2015
Jiangshui Huang1, Benny Davidovitch, Christian D Santangelo
1Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA.
Abstract:
An ultrathin polymer sheet floating on a fluid forms a periodic pattern of parallel wrinkles when subjected to uniaxial compression. The wave number of the wrinkle pattern increases sharply near the fluid meniscus where the translational symmetry of this one-dimensional corrugated profile is broken. We show that the observed multiscale morphology is controlled by a new "softness" number that quantifies the relative strength of capillary forces at the edge and the rigidity of the bulk pattern. We discover a new elastic cascade by which the wrinkling pattern in the bulk is smoothly matched to the fine structure at the edge by a discrete series of higher Fourier modes.
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