The steric polymer layer of hairy wormlike micelles

Hairy wormlike micelles are constituted of surfactant micelles onto which amphiphilic copolymers are adsorbed. The copolymer layer induces a steric repulsion between the micelles, which is evidenced by the emergence of a broad peak in the structure factor for semi-dilute solutions. In this paper, we propose three experimental determinations of the thickness of the copolymer layer, h. We compare the results of the different approaches and show that both the numerical values of h and its variation with the surface density of the copolymer layer are in very good agreement with simple theoretical expectations.