title: Estimating the viscoelastic moduli of complex fluids from observation of Brownian motion of a particle confined to a harmonic trap.
abstract: A procedure is proposed to estimate the viscoelastic properties of a complex fluid from the behavior of the velocity autocorrelation function of a suspended Brownian particle, trapped in a harmonic potential. The procedure is tested for a model complex fluid with a given frequency-dependent shear viscosity. The analysis shows that the procedure can provide a rather accurate prediction of the viscoelastic properties of the fluid on the basis of experimental data on the velocity autocorrelation function of the trapped Brownian particle in a limited range of time.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik A, RWTH Aachen University, Templergraben 55, 52056 Aachen, Germany. ufelder@physik.rwth-aachen.de
authors.forename: B U
authors.initials: BU
authors.lastname: Felderhof