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Updated: Apr 18, 2026

Combining Microfluidics and Microrheology to Determine Rheological Properties of Soft Matter during Repeated Phase Transitions
Published on: April 19, 2018
Accounting for inertia effects to access the high-frequency microrheology of viscoelastic fluids
P Domínguez-García1, Frédéric Cardinaux2, Elena Bertseva3
1Departamento de Física de Materiales, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid 28040, Spain.
Abstract:
We study the Brownian motion of microbeads immersed in water and in a viscoelastic wormlike micelles solution by optical trapping interferometry and diffusing wave spectroscopy. Through the mean-square displacement obtained from both techniques, we deduce the mechanical properties of the fluids at high frequencies by explicitly accounting for inertia effects of the particle and the surrounding fluid at short time scales. For wormlike micelle solutions, we recover the 3/4 scaling exponent for the loss modulus over two decades in frequency as predicted by the theory for semiflexible polymers.
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