SELF-ASSEMBLY OF NEUTRAL AND IONIC SURFACTANTS - AN OFF-LATTICE MONTE-CARLO APPROACH

We study self-assembly of surfactants in two dimensions using off-latt ice Monte Carlo moves. Here the Monte Carlo moves consist of slitherin g snake reptation motion of the surfactant chains and kink-jump of the individual monomers. Unlike many previous studies an important featur e of our model is that the solution degrees of freedom are kept implic it in the model by appropriate choice of the phenomenological interact ion parameters for the surfactants. This enables us to investigate rat her large systems with less number of parameters. The method is powerf ul enough tb study multimicellar systems with regular and inverted mic elles for both neutral and ionic surfactants. As a function of several parameters of the model, we study self-assembly of neutral surfactant s into micelles of various forms-and sizes and compute appropriate clu ster-size distributions. Ionic surfactants exhibit, apart from micelli zation, additional intermicellar ordering.-We further study the role o f host particles to mimic recent experiments on surfactant-silicate co operative self-assembly, and demonstrate the possibility of generalize d pathways leading to-host encased micellization. (C) 1998 American In stitute of Physics.