Self-Healing of Surfactant Surface Micelles on Millisecond Time Scales

We study the dynamics of surfactant micelles at the solid-liquid interface using a new atomic force-microscopic imaging mode to visualize the nanometer-level structural features of the micelles and the picometer-level lattice of the substrate simultaneously. We find that defects created in a crystalline micellar array by the scanning probe tip self-heal flawlessly in less than 6 ms.