Self-organization, phase transition and dynamics in amphiphilic systems

Abstract

Recent studies on the structures, critical phenomena and slow dynamics in amphiphiles/ water/oil ternary systems using small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) and neutron spin echo (NSE) are reviewed. From the fitting of the scattering profiles of SANS to Teubner and Strey's and Gompper and Schick's formula we could obtain several structural and interaction parameters of a system. We observed critical scattering near the phase boundary into the decomposition of a system by SANS. The observed crossover from mean field to 3d-Ising behavior is interpreted in terms of an expression by Belyakov and Kiselev with an appropriate Ginzburg reduced temperature. We observed NSE signal from a system and obtained effective diffusion coefficients for the shape fluctuations of the interfacial films in lamellar phase which has two decaying processes. The powerfulness of neutron-scattering methods to characterize the structure and dynamics of amphiphilic systems is illustrated.