Growth of charged micelles

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Abstract
We consider the electrostatics of charged, cylindrical micelles with spherical end-caps. In the semidilute regime (volume fraction Φ << 1), and with no added salt, a model calculation which includes nonlinearities suggests that Coulomb interactions result in an additional contribution to the free energy of an end-cap that modifies the growth law for the average micelle size. In some cases, the micelle size varies approximately as Φ (1/2)(1+Λ), where Λ > 0 depends on the renormalized coulomb charge of an end cap. These results may help explain anomalies, seen at low added salt, in recent experiments on the dynamics of worm-like micelles