We employ multiple-sinusoid modulated optical tweezers to measure the frequency-dependent rheological parameters of a linear viscoelastic fluid over five decades of frequency in a single shot, hitherto not achieved using active microrheology alone. Thus, we spatially modulate a trapped probe particle embedded in a fluid medium with a combination of a square wave—which is by definition a superposition of odd sinusoidal harmonics—and a linear superposition of multiple sinusoids at a wideband frequency range, with complete control over the amplitude, frequency, and relative phase of the modulating signals. For the modulating signals, we selectively excite the particle by larger amplitudes at high frequencies where the particle response is low, thereby enabling wideband active microrheology with large signal to noise. This mitigates the principal issue associated with conventional active microrheology—which is low bandwidth—and also renders our method better in terms of signal to noise, and faster compared to passive microrheology. We determine the complex viscoelastic parameters of the fluid by extracting the phase response (relative to input excitation) of the probe from the experimentally recorded time series data of the probe displacement and employing well-known theoretical correlations thereafter. We test the efficacy of our method by studying a variety of linear viscoelastic media—polyacrylamide-water solution, worm-like micelles, and polyethylene oxide—at different concentrations and find good agreement of the measured complex fluid parameters with the known literature values.

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• Viscoelasticity
• Microrheology
• Optical tweezers