Speaker
Description
In 2003, Isabelle Grillo published a highly publicized article on Le Pastis, analyzing with SANS the large-scale structure of droplets responsible for the famous milky appearance of this Mediterranean drink. At the same time, the seminal article of Vitale and Katz on the “Ouzo effect” appeared. These two references kindled an ever-growing field of applied and fundamental research. Isabelle recently worked with Leonardo Chiappisi on a South-Italian drink, “Limoncello”, where droplets are formed whose size remains much smaller than for Ouzo. With her continuous interest in such common and (only) seemingly simple systems, Isabelle and I joined the team led by Thomas Zemb and Werner Kunz on “pre-Ouzo”: nanoscale fluctuations of concentrations in mixtures of liquids, otherwise known as UltraFlexible MicroeEmulsions or Surfactant-Free MicroEmulsions, to understand their relation to the Ouzo phenomenon. SAXS data on ID02 and SANS data on D11 and D33 at ILL demonstrated that Ouzo is in fact a metastable equilibrium between two fluids with nanoscale organization. I will show the current results of our work and the future steps we will undertake to reveal the complexity of these ordinary fluid mixtures.
