Active particles sense micromechanical properties of glasses

Understanding the mechanical properties of glasses is a great scientific challenge. A powerful technique to study the material response on a microscopic scale is microrheology, in which one analyses the translational dynamics of an externally driven probe particle. Here we show that the translational and rotational dynamics of a self-propelled probe particle with an unconstrained orientational motion can be used to gather information about the mechanical properties of a colloidal glassy system. We find that its rotational diffusion coefficient continuously increases towards the glass transition and drops down in the glassy state. Such unexpected behaviour demonstrates a strong coupling mechanism between the orientation of the active probe particle and the glassy structure, which can be well described by a simple rheological model. Our results suggest that active probe particles may be useful for the micromechanical characterization of complex materials.