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Discontinuous bending rigidity and cosurfactant adsorption of amphiphile layers
1Université Bordeaux 1, CPMOH, UMR CNRS 5798, 351 cours de la Libération, 33405 Talence, France.
Physical Review Letters
|June 21, 2001
Abstract:
We study a simple model for an amphiphilic layer that may adsorb cosurfactant molecules from a reservoir. Upon varying the length of the cosurfactant, we obtain a discontinuous change of the adsorption rate and a corresponding discontinuity of the bending rigidity kappa. With realistic values for the chemical potential and the interaction energy of the hydrophobic tails, our model accounts quantitatively for the measured rigidity and the discontinuity observed for the ternary system AOT/water/oil and for SDS/alcohol bilayers.