Discovery of Monodisperse Micelles with Discrete Aggregation Numbers

Fundamental study of conventional micelles, such as of their thermodynamics, structure, and formation kinetics, has been comprehensively performed since the concept of micelles was proposed more than 100 years ago. According to the general framework, micelles are relatively monodisperse and their aggregation numbers ( N agg s) are distributed over a range of values. However, we found that micelles preferentially adopt particular N agg s and demonstrate perfect monodispersity when the N agg becomes relatively small (<20). We named these micelles Platonic micelles. In this chapter, we review our studies of these unique micelles.