Overview
Microrheology probes the mechanical response of complex media by following the motion of small tracers. In active or nonlinear regimes, the probe itself can perturb the medium, producing rich nonequilibrium behaviour.
A recent model in this direction aims to clarify how microscopic collisions, memory, crowding and viscoelastic structure affect the motion of a driven particle [for25], and how the medium can in turn be probed by studying the particle's statistics and motion. Earlier models [bai21,iub20] found long temporal relaxations in the recombination dynamics of living polymers, such as networks composed of micellar tubes.
The work is motivated by soft matter and biological physics, but the questions are broadly statistical-mechanical: how does a many-body environment transmit forces, store memory and dissipate energy?
Selected papers
[for25] Fluctuations of driven probes reveal nonequilibrium transitions in complex fluids
Simulations and theory for a complex fluid probed by a driven microparticle, whose variance reveals different behaviours of the fluid.
[bai21] The rise and fall of branching: A slowing down mechanism in relaxing wormlike micellar networks
A theory for the temporal scaling in the recombination dynamics of micellar networks.
[iub20] Aging of living polymer networks: A model with patchy particles
Simulations revealing the complex recombination dynamics of micellar networks.