Formation of New Morphologies of Surfactant−Inorganic−Water Systems under Spherical Confinements

Application of lattice Monte Carlo method to the surfactant−inorganic−solvent system under a spherical confinement reveals that the confined self-assembly leads to a rich variety of morphologies. Many of the ordered structures are observed in our simulations, such as the core−shell spherical network structure and spiral structure with a core network, which have not been found for the bulk surfactant or copolymer systems and in experiments. The simulated results suggest that the occurrence of these novel structures depends on the pore diameter of the spherical cavity and the surfactant architecture.