Forceless Sadowsky strips are spherical
E.L. Starostin & G.H.M. van der Heijden
We show that thin rectangular ribbons, defined as energy-minimizing
configurations of the Sadowsky functional for narrow developable elastic
strips, have a propensity to form spherical shapes in the sense that
forceless solutions lie on a sphere. This has implications for ribbonlike
objects in (bio)polymer physics and nanoscience that cannot be described
by the classical wormlike chain model. A wider class of functionals with
this property is identified.
keywords: elastic strip, one-dimensional variational problem, Sadowsky
functional, equilibrium equations, spherical curves, bio- and nanofilaments
Physical Review E 97, 023001 (2018)