MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION OF SPATIOTEMPORAL ORGANIZATION OF AMPHIPHILES IN WATER AND AIR-WATER-INTERFACE

Following the Larson prescription for modelling amphiphilic molecules in ternary microemulsions, we develop a microscopic lattice model for a pseudo-ternary system consisting of amphiphiles, water and air, wher e water is separated from the air above by a sharp well-defined interf ace. We investigate, through extensive Monte Carlo (MC) computer simul ation, the dependence of the spatio-temporal organization of the amphi philes in this model complex fluid in various regimes of amphiphile co ncentration, temperature and the length of the hydrophobic tails of th e amphiphiles. We also study the average orientational order, the aver age vertical extension and the distribution of the vertical extensions of the amphiphiles, for several different values of their concentrati on and chain length, over a wide range of temperature. We compare our results with the corresponding results of laboratory experiments.