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The mechanical properties of polymer gels based on cytoskeleton proteins(e.g. actin) have been studied extensively due to their significant role inbiological cell motility and in maintaining the cell's structural integrity.Microrheology is the natural method of choice for such studies due to itseconomy in sample volume, its wide frequency range, and its spatialsensitivity. In microrheology, the thermal motion of tracer particles embeddedin a complex fluid is used to extract the fluid's viscoelastic properties.Comparing the motion of a single particle to the correlated motion of particlepairs, it is possible to extract viscoelastic properties at different lengthscales. In a recent study, a crossover between intermediate and bulk responseof complex fluids was discovered in microrheology measurements of reconstitutedactin networks. This crossover length was related to structural and mechanicalproperties of the networks, such as their mesh size and dynamic correlationlength. Here we capitalize on this result giving a detailed description of ouranalysis scheme, and demonstrating how this relation can be used to extract thedynamic correlation length of a polymer network. We further study the relationbetween the dynamic correlation length and the structure of the network, byintroducing a new length scale, the average filament length, without alteringthe network's mesh size. Contrary to the prevailing assumption, that thedynamic correlation length is equivalent to the mesh size of the network, wefind that the dynamic correlation length increases once the filament length isreduced below the crossover distance.

Extracting the dynamic correlation length of actin networks from microrheology experiments