  We use a disk galaxy evolution model to investigate whether galaxies with
exponential surface brightness profiles can be produced in a cosmologically
motivated framework for disk galaxy formation. Our model follows the accretion,
cooling, and ejection of baryonic mass, as a function of radius, inside growing
dark matter haloes. The surface density profile of the disk is determined by
detailed angular momentum conservation, starting from the distribution of
specific angular momentum as found in cosmological simulations. Exponential and
quasi-exponential disks can be produced by our model through a combination of
supernova driven galactic outflows (which preferentially remove low angular
momentum material), intrinsic variation in the angular momentum distribution of
the halo gas, and the inefficiency of star formation at large radii. We use
observations from the SDSS NYU-VAGC to show that the median Sersic index of
blue galaxies is a strong function of stellar mass. For blue galaxies, low mass
galaxies have a median n=1.3, while high mass galaxies have a median n=4. Our
model with energy driven outflows correctly reproduces this trend, whereas our
models with momentum driven outflows and no outflows over predict the Sersic
indices in low mass galaxies. We show that the observed fraction of
"bulge-less" exponential galaxies is a strong function of stellar mass. For
Milky-Way mass galaxies less than 0.1% of blue galaxies are bulge-less, whereas
for M33 mass galaxies bulge-less and quasi-bulgeless galaxies are typical.
These results suggest that the difficulty of hierarchical formation models to
produce bulge-less Milky-Way mass galaxies is in fact not a problem. However,
the problem of producing M33 like galaxies remains, and will provide a key test
for hierarchical galaxy formation models. [Abridged]
