Self-affinne rupture lines in paper sheets

Experiments were carried out using a tensile testing machine to study the morphology of rupture lines in paper. Constant velocity strain was applied until the breaking process separated the sample into two pieces. The resulting quasi one-dimensional patterns show scaling correlations usually over two orders of magnitudes. The measured values of the Hurst exponent ζ are in the range 0.63 < ζ < 0.72. The relevance of models of statistical physics in the interpretation of the results is discussed.