Micellar cubic
A micellar cubic 'phase is a lyotropic liquid crystal phase formed when the concentration of micelles dispersed in a solvent is sufficiently high that they are forced to pack into a structure having a long-ranged positional order. For example, spherical micelles a cubic packing of a body-centered cubic lattice. Normal topology micellar cubic phases, denoted by the symbol I1, are the first lyotropic liquid crystalline phases that are formed by type I amphiphiles. The amphiphiles' hydrocarbon tails are contained on the inside of the micelle and hence the polar-apolar interface of the aggregates has a positive mean curvature, by definition. The first pure surfactant system found to exhibit three different type I micellar cubic phases was observed in the dodecaoxyethylene mono-n-dodecyl ether /water system.
Inverse topology' micellar cubic phases are observed for some type II amphiphiles at very high amphiphile concentrations. These aggregates, in which water is the minority phase, have a polar-apolar interface with a negative mean curvature. The structures of the normal topology micellar cubic phases that are formed by some types of amphiphiles symmetry formed in a ternary system of an amphiphilic diblock copolymer, water, and p-xylene.