Single-shot wideband active mircorheology using multiple-sinusoid modulated Optical Tweezers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel single-shot active microrheology technique using multiple sinusoid modulated optical tweezers to measure frequency-dependent viscoelastic properties of fluids across five decades of frequency with high signal-to-noise ratio.

Contribution

The authors develop a wideband active microrheology method employing multiple sinusoid modulations, enabling rapid, high-bandwidth measurement of viscoelastic parameters in a single experiment.

Findings

Successfully measured viscoelastic parameters over five decades of frequency.

Achieved higher signal-to-noise ratio compared to passive microrheology.

Validated method on polyacrylamide-water solutions with results matching literature.

Abstract

We employ multiple sinusoid modulated optical tweezers to measure the frequency dependent rheological parameters of a linear viscoelastic fluid over five decades of frequency in a single shot, hitherto not achieved using active microrheology alone. Thus, we spatially modulate a trapped probe particle embedded in a fluid medium with a combination of a square wave - which is by definition a superposition of odd sinusoidal harmonics - and a linear superposition of multiple sinusoids at a wideband frequency range, with complete control over the amplitude, frequency and relative phase of the modulating signals. For the latter, we selectively excite the particle by larger amplitudes at high frequencies where the particle response is low, thereby enabling wideband active microrheology with large signal-to-noise. This mitigates the principal issue associated with conventional active microrheology - which is low bandwidth - and also renders our method better in terms of signal to noise, and faster compared to passive microrheology. We determine the complex viscoelastic parameters of the fluid by extracting the phase response (relative to input excitation) of the probe from the experimentally recorded time series data of the probe displacement, and employing well-known theoretical correlations thereafter. We test the efficacy of our method by studying a linear viscoelastic media (polyacrylamide-water solution) at different concentrations, and find good agreement of the measured fluid parameters with known literature values.