Enhancement of Lateral Diffusion in Catanionic Vesicles during Multilamellar-to-Unilamellar Transition

Catanionic vesicles are formed spontaneously by mixing cationic and anionic dispersions in aqueous solution in suitable conditions. Because of spontaneity in formation, long-term stability, and easy modulation of size and charge, they have numerous advantages over conventional lipid-based vesicles. The dynamics of such vesicles is of interest in the field of biomedicine, as they can be used to deliver drug molecules into the cell membrane. Dynamics of catanionic vesicles based on sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) have been studied using incoherent elastic and quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) techniques. Neutron scattering experiments have been carried out on two backscattering spectrometers, IRIS and IN16B, which have different energy resolutions and energy transfer windows. An elastic fixed-window scan carried out using IN16B shows a phase transition at ∼307 K during the heating cycle, whereas on cooling the transition occurred at ∼294 K. DSC results are found t...