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Soap films break up by an inertial process. We present here the first observations on freely suspended films of long-chain polymers, where viscous effects are dominant and no surfactant is present. A hole is nucleated at time 0 and grows up to a radius R (t) at time t. A surprising feature is that the liquid from the hole is not collected into a rim (as it is in soap films): The liquid spreads out without any significant change of the film thickness. The radius R (t) grows exponentially with time, R (t) while in soap films R (t) is linear. The rise time 2 where is viscosity, e is thickness (in the micron range), and is surface tension. A simple model is developed to explain this growth law.
Debrégeas et al. (1995) studied this question.