DOES A POLYMERIZED MEMBRANE CRUMPLE

Evidence for crumpled conformations of polymerized membranes is reported. This is based on Monte Carlo simulations of flexible self-avoiding plaquette surfaces. The radius of gyration R scales with the surfaces area A according to R2 approximately A0.8. It is shown that the correlation function between plaquette normals <n(0) . n(x)> decays rapidly to zero for plaquette membranes, in contrast to hard-sphere membranes exhibiting long ranged strong correlations. The probability distribution P(cos theta) of enclosed angles between adjacent plaquettes is discussed with respect to differences between plaquette and hard-sphere membranes.