Diffusing wave microrheology of strongly attractive dense emulsions

We advance the microrheological interpretation of optical diffusing wave spectroscopy (DWS) measurements of strongly attractive emulsions at dense droplet volume fractions, ϕ. Beyond accounting for collective scattering, we show that measuring the mean free path of optical transport over a wide range of ϕ is necessary to quantify the effective size of the DWS probes, which we infer to be local dense clusters of droplets through a decorated core-shell network model. This approach yields microrheological elastic shear moduli that are in quantitative agreement with mechanical rheometry.