FIG. 11.

(A) A cartoon model of a (single-tailed) surfactant molecule. (B) A schematic of a spherical micelle with the thickness of the solvophobic core (ℓ) and the area per head group (a) highlighted. A wedge-like portion of the micelle is cutaway to illustrate the interior packing of tails. (C) A spherocylinder model of a worm-like micelle, which has a cylindrical portion of length L capped by two hemispherical micelles of equal radius. (D) An energy landscape for spherocylinders described by the model in eq. (44) with P⁻¹ = 2.25 and $\overline{k}=0.1$. The dashed orange line shows the (L = 0) spherical micelle branch and the dashed pink line shows the (L = 0) worm-like micelle branch, whose corresponding energy as a function of reduced aggregation number is plotted in (E).