Organised Structure in Soap Solutions

Abstract

MY simple picture, fully described elsewhere^1–3, of the aggregates in the clear mobile solutions of paraffin-chain salts is that they are essentially liquid in nature and spherical in form. The discovery⁴, by X-ray diffraction, of a characteristic long spacing, decreasing with increase of concentration, appeared to favour a different picture—that of a lamellar micelle in which the chains lay parallel to one another and the outer faces of arrayed ionic groups were separated by a definite thickness of water. One of the protagonists of the lamellar micelle has recently⁵ come to modify his picture considerably, and his collaborator⁶ to consider that the X-ray data can be explained by the spherical micelle.