ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses many other amphiphiles, in fact most of those that prefer packing into long cylindrical micelles, first assemble — for entropic reasons — into small spherical micelles. Once the size of the micelles exceeds the persistence length of a cylindrical micelle, their conformational behavior is similar to that of flexible polymers. In a spherical micelle the hydrocarbon tail occupies, on average, a conelike section of the hydrophobic core, whose base is at the hydrocarbon-water interface and whose tip is in the center of the micelle. Wormlike micelles are formed by numerous ionic and nonionic, single-tailed surfactants, but also by certain double-tailed amphiphiles, as well as block copolymers. The chapter aims to emphasize the intimate relationship between structural-molecular characteristics of amphiphile organization to the thermodynamics of micelle formation and growth.
