Fusion and Fission of Surfactant Micelles

In 1998, my postdoc Rharbi discovered that we could use the fluorescence of water-insoluble pyrene derivatives to study slow exchange processes of solutes between simple surfactant micelles in water. We built a stopped-flow injector for our fluorescence spectrometer, and used this instrument to study exchange processes that occur on the time scale of milliseconds to hours. [see J. Am. Chem. Soc., 123, 1016-1016 (2000)] Over the subsequent six years, we studied fusion and fission kinetics of nonionic and anionic micelles. Particularly for the case of sodium dodecyl sulfate micelles, we were able to answer questions that have been of interest dating back to the mid 1970's. [see J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 126, 6025-6034 (2004)]