Participants: Erick Sarmiento, José Luis Arauz
The Brownian motion of a particle embedded in a complex fluid is quite different from the case of a newtonian fluids. In particular, different time regimes appear in the temporal evolution of the Brownian motion, finding, for example, sub-diffusive regimes in the mean squared displacement. This difference is attributed to the interaction of the particle with the complex fluid. Previously, our group has done several contributions to this topic, called microrheology, including the effects of confinement in microrheological experiments and the development of rotational microrheology using optically anisotropic colloidal particles (see paper1, paper2, paper3).
Nowadays we are exploring microrheological measurements in polymeric suspensions just above the crossover concentration, where depletion effects are reported to be important, and also comparing our results with the zeroth order theory of colloid-polymer interaction, the asakura-oosawa model
Figures from Eur. Phys. J E, 38:3 (2015) and Soft Matter, 11:655 (2015)
Last Uptade: January 2015