Recently, charged worm-like micelles (WLM) (giant aggregations of surfactant
molecules) have attracted additional interest because they show some
features very similar to polyelectrolytes. The problem with most
polyelectrolytes is their weak scattering power when performing neutron or
light scattering experiments, which makes it almost impossible to produce
data with a sufficient accuracy over the required range of scattering
vector, at low concentrations, where single-coil properties can still be
resolved. In contrast, charged wormlike micelles have a much higher
scattering power due to their much bigger sizes. For this reason charged
WLM in solution has been proposed as a model system for polyelectrolytes. In
this talk we focus on Monte Carlo simulations of charged WLM with particular
emphasis on the scattering functions and on scaling properties of such
systems.
©Andreas Voigt