Microrheology is a branch of rheology having the same principles as
conventional bulk rheology, but working on micron length scales and micro-litre
volumes.
Optical tweezers have been successfully used with Newtonian fluids for
rheological purposes such as determining fluid viscosity. Conversely, when
optical tweezers are used to measure the viscoelastic properties of complex
fluids the results are either limited to the material's high-frequency
response, discarding important information related to the low-frequency
behavior, or they are supplemented by low-frequency measurements performed with
different techniques, often without presenting an overlapping region of clear
agreement between the sets of results. We present a simple experimental
procedure to perform microrheological measurements over the widest frequency
range possible with optical tweezers. A generalised Langevin equation is used
to relate the frequency-dependent moduli of the complex fluid to the
time-dependent trajectory of a probe particle as it flips between two optical
traps that alternately switch on and off.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Special Issue of the Journal of
Optic
