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We report on the linear viscoelastic properties of mixtures comprisingmultiarm star (as model soft colloids) and long linear chain homopolymers in agood solvent. In contrast to earlier works, we investigated symmetric mixtures(with a size ratio of 1) and showed that the polymeric and colloidal responsescan be decoupled. The adopted experimental protocol involved probing the linearchain dynamics in different star environments. To this end, we studied mixtureswith different star mass fraction, which was kept constant while linear chainswere added and their entanglement plateau modulus ($G_p$) and terminalrelaxation time ($\tau_d$) were measured as functions of their concentration.Two distinct scaling regimes were observed for both $G_p$ and $\tau_d$: at lowlinear polymer concentrations, a weak concentration dependence was observed,that became even weaker as the fraction of stars in the mixtures increased intothe star glassy regime. On the other hand, at higher linear polymerconcentrations, the classical entangled polymer scaling was recovered. Simplescaling arguments show that the threshold crossover concentration between thetwo regimes corresponds to the maximum osmotic star compression and signals thetransition from confined to bulk dynamics. These results provide the neededingredients to complete the state diagram of soft colloid-polymer mixtures andinvestigate their dynamics at large polymer-colloid size ratios. They alsooffer an alternative way to explore aspects of the colloidal glass transitionand the polymer dynamics in confinement. Finally, they provide a new avenue totailor the rheology of soft composites.

Transition from confined to bulk dynamics in symmetric star-linear polymer mixtures