Growth and branching of charged wormlike micelles as revealed by dilution laws

The successive transitions of morphology in aqueous solutions of interacting micelles are directly evidenced by the position q* of the correlation peak of the small angle neutron scattering profiles. As the volume fraction Phi increases, q* successively fits to the dilution laws expected for spheres and cylinders, and eventually gets close to the one expected for sheets when the micelles get branched. Data in between the swelling laws are quantitatively analyzed in terms of aggregation number and junction density. Varying the temperature in the dilute regime yields the end-cap energy which varies with molecular structure and scales as Phi(-1/2). In the semidilute regime, the junction density scales as nu(j) approximately Phi(1.8), close but slightly faster than theoretically expected. The boosting effect of intermicellar repulsion on growth and branching is pointed out by the present results which directly show that both condensation processes keep the micelles further apart.