CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS SEMINAR
                         Monday, February 4, 2002
              4:10 p.m., Room 224 Physics-Astronomy Building

                "What is Being Measured in Microrheology?"

                             Alex J. Levine
                  Department of Chemical Engineering &
                   The Materials Research Laboratory
                University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract:  

Microrheology is the study of the rheological properties of
a soft material by monitoring the thermally fluctuating position of
small, embedded probe particles. This technique has important
advantages over traditional rheology in that it can be used in
microscopic samples and can be extended to high frequencies, however,
along with these significant advantages come a number of theoretical
questions regarding the interpretation of the data. In this talk, I
study these theoretical issues in detail.