Microrheology of microscopically phase separated hydrogels

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This is an applied physics project which addresses an important problem within food science, and also provides an opportunity to apply, develop and model novel scattering/imaging techniques for making high-resolution rheological measurements, that could become widely used in soft matter science in general.Ice-cream is a thermodynamically unstable, multiscale composite. Its continuous phase is an emulsion which remains unfrozen due to the colligative effect of its solutes: sugars, polysaccharides and proteins. This continuous, aqueous phase contributes to the texture and the stability of the ice-cream but is not always sufficiently characterized by bulk methods. So, this project will apply and develop micro-rheology (e.g. particle tracking, correlation spectroscopy and scattering techniques) to resolve local rheological properties of these types of systems. The student will learn to model stochastic (i.e. random) thermal processes and to use sophisticated lab equipment, both at Leeds University and at Unliever.