Abstract
During the last two years, mesomorphic structures for polyelectrolytes with ionically bound surfactants have been reported. This has now been extended to the case of hydrogen bonding. For poly (4-vinyl pyridine)-pentadecyl phenol (P4VP − (PDP)x), the long period Lp of the lamellar structure is found to decrease as a function of x, in complete contrast to polyelectrolyte systems. Scaling arguments predict that the x-dependence of the long period is entirely due to the reduction in the thickness of the polymer layer and satisfies Lp ∝ x−1, as observed experimentally. Polyelectrolyte-surfactant complexes, on the other hand, are always locally fully complexed due to cooperative complexation with a corresponding x-independent long period.