Freezing a fluid random surface

We investigate a dynamically triangulated random surface action that consists of a Gaussian term plus the modulus of the intrinsic scalar curvature. We find that the flips are frozen out and the internal geometry is regularized as the coefficient of the latter term is increased. Such a term thus provides a way of interpolating between dynamically triangulated (i.e., fluid) and crystalline random surfaces. © 1993 The American Physical Society.