Gerhard Gompper

Lattice Theories of Microemulsions

Ideally, one would like to have a microscopic basis for a theory of microemulsions. Such a theory would begin with the constituents of the system and produce from their known properties the observed behaviors of microemulsions. There are difficulties of many kinds in such an approach. Of course, the description of constituents must be simplified radically in order to extract general behaviors from particular systems. This simplification is common to the theoretical description of most physical systems. There is an additional difficulty, however, which arises in the theoretical description of a microemulsion; this is the lack of agreement on its defining behaviors. It is prudent, then, for us to state at the outset those properties which we consider to be characteristic of microemulsions, and therefore to be encompassed by any theory of them.