Anomalous elasticity of an ordered lamellar liquid foam

We investigate experimentally the linear viscoelastic properties of a lamellar liquid foam as a function of the cell size and spatial organisation. The system consists of multilamellar vesicles generated by a simple shear flow on a lyotropic lamellar phase. The vesicles can be prepared either in an amorphous or a spatially ordered state. Their size is easily tunable in the range R = 0.5-15 μm. Whereas the shear modulus of the amorphous lamellar foam is alike that of usual liquid foams or concentrated emulsions and scales linearly with 1/R, the elastic modulus of the ordered foam is almost independent of the cell size. This result --probably the first describing the elasticity of an ordered foam-like system-- remains unexplained. Received 7 August 2000