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Microemulsions: A Landau-Ginzburg theory

1990; American Physical Society; Volume: 65; Issue: 21 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1103/physrevlett.65.2736

1092-0145

Kan Chen, C. Jayaprakash, Rahul Pandit, Wolfgang Wenzel,

Lipid Membrane Structure and Behavior

We present a Landau-Ginzburg theory for oil-water-surfactant mixtures with a scalar order parameter \ensuremath{\psi} for the oil-water subsystem and a vector \ensuremath{\tau} for the surfactant part. A physical interpretation of the parameters in terms of single-membrane energetics is given. A detailed density-functional calculation yields three-phase coexistence between oil-rich, water-rich, and microemulsion phases, and modulated phases including lamellar, columnar, and cubic phases. The computed structure factor for water in the microemulsion phase shows a variety of trends in qualitative accord with experiments.