Two-point active microrheology in a viscous medium exploiting a motional resonance excited in dual-trap optical tweezers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel active two-point microrheology technique using motional resonance in dual-trap optical tweezers to accurately measure the viscosity of viscous fluids, showing high agreement with commercial rheometers.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that resonance amplitude and phase responses can be used for precise active microrheology, especially at large particle separations, improving viscosity measurement accuracy.

Findings

Viscosity measured with ~1% accuracy compared to commercial rheometers.

Phase response zero-crossing is more reliable than amplitude for large separations.

Method applicable to viscoelastic materials for enhanced accuracy.

Abstract

Two-point microrheology measurements from widely separated colloidal particles approach the bulk viscosity of the host medium more reliably than corresponding single point measurements. In addition, active microrheology offers the advantage of enhanced signal to noise over passive techniques. Recently, we reported the observation of a motional resonance induced in a probe particle in dual-trap optical tweezers when the control particle was driven externally [Paul et al. Phys. Rev. E {\bf 96}, 050102(R) (2017)]. We now demonstrate that the amplitude and phase characteristics of the motional resonance can be used as a sensitive tool for active two-point microrheology to measure the viscosity of a viscous fluid. Thus, we measure the viscosity of viscous liquids from both the amplitude and phase response of the resonance, and demonstrate that the zero-crossing of the phase response of the probe particle with respect to the external drive is superior compared to the amplitude response in measuring viscosity at large particle separations. We compare our viscosity measurements with that using a commercial rheometer and obtain an agreement $\sim1\%$. The method can be extended to viscoelastic material where the frequency dependence of the resonance may provide further accuracy for active microrheological measurements.