STRUCTURE AND FLEXIBILITY OF WORM-LIKE MICELLES

Small-angle neutron scattering and static light scattering experiments have been performed on worm-like micelles formed by soybean lecithin and trace amounts of water in deuterated iso-octane. The structure and flexibility of the aggregates have been investigated as a function of solution composition. The data analysis comprises an application from results of conformation space renormalization group theory and a non- linear least-squares fitting procedure based upon a recently developed numerical expression for the scattering function of a worm-like chain with excluded volume effects.