Mechanical Signature of a Chemically Driven Bath

Abstract: Using optical tweezers, we demonstrate that the CuAAC click reaction increases the positional fluctuations of a trapped 2 micrometer colloid by at least 20% without altering the trap's corner frequency. This excess variance relaxes to the thermal baseline as reagents are depleted. The additional noise is Gaussian, with a flat power spectrum extending past the corner frequency up to 7 kHz. Notably, the noise amplitude decouples from the macroscale reaction rate, and independent molecular force dipoles are orders of magnitude too small to generate the observed variance. Although the chemical free energy released locally exceeds the energy absorbed by the bead by five orders of magnitude, this energy couples inefficiently. The mechanical action of the reacting bath cannot be represented as a sum of independent molecular events.