A New Class of Shear Induced Structure in Viscoelastic Micellar Solutions

In recent years much research has focused on wormlike micellar surfactant solutions. An appealing aspect of studying these systems is that their viscoelastic response can be described as a Maxwell fluid. However, in the nonlinear regime the rheological response of various systems is drastically different. For example, some solutions shear thicken, while others experience phenomena such as spurt effect (a), shear-induced phases (b), shear induced structures (c, d) as shown in Fig. 1.