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Equilibrium Onions?

L. Ramos, D. Roux, P. D. Olmsted, M. E. Cates

cond-mat.softarXiv:cond-mat/0407021

Abstract

We demonstrate the possibility of a stable equilibrium multi-lamellar (``onion'') phase in pure lamellar systems (no excess solvent) due to a sufficiently negative Gaussian curvature modulus. The onion phase is stabilized by non-linear elastic moduli coupled to a polydisperse size distribution (Apollonian packing) to allow space-filling without appreciable elastic distortion. This model is compared to experiments on copolymer-decorated lamellar surfactant systems, with reasonable qualitative agreement.

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