Effects of Chain length on the Nanoscopic Dynamics of Surface Active Ionic Liquid Micelles

Ionic liquids (ILs) have a huge upsurge of interest in the field of chemical synthesis, catalysis, electrochemistry and pharmacology mainly due to their highly tunable nature and exceptional properties. Surface active ionic liquids (SAILs), a subclass of ILs, can form micelles in aqueous solution and are therefore emerging as novel surfactants. The lipophilicity of SAILs can easily be tailored by changing its alkyl chain length which modulates various properties of these micelles including size, shape and aggregation number. This is mainly due to the alteration of the molecular packing in the micelles and thus expected to affect the dynamics significantly. The aim of the proposed experiment is to investigate effects of chain length on the dynamics of SAIL based micelles and to establish a correlation with the microstructure of the micelles.