The World’s Hottest Engine Is Smaller Than a Cell and Hotter Than the Sun’s Corona

Technically speaking, one the engine A device that converts some energy into mechanical energy. Taking that definition to heart, physicists used the strange laws of microscopic physics and built the hottest engine ever—which also happens to be the smallest engine ever built.

In a forthcoming paper for Physical review letterResearchers describe a tiny engine trapped inside a microscopic particle stuck in electrical limbo. Using this setup, the engine reportedly achieved temperatures of 10 million Kelvin, or about 18 million degrees Fahrenheit.the cold than the center of the Sun (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) but much hotter than the corona (up to 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit).

“By grappling with thermodynamics at this unknown level, we can design and test better engines in the future that challenge our understanding of nature,” Molly Message, lead author of the study and a PhD student at King’s College London (KCL), UK, said in a statement. statement.

Rules get fun in the microscopic world

In the engine, electrodes trap the microparticles in a near-vacuum setup called a Paul trap. When the researchers applied a noise voltage to the electrodes, the particle began to vibrate aggressively, causing an exponential rise in temperature for the overall system.

The results were interesting. According to the researchers, the engine fluctuates between being highly efficient and completely defying the basic laws of thermodynamics. In some cycles, the engine’s power output exceeds its power consumption.

At other times, the engine randomly cools down when subjected to conditions that would have made it overheat. The researchers noted that this was likely due to invisible forces at play due to the system’s small size.

“We can see all these strange thermodynamic behaviors, which are completely intuitive if you’re a bacterium or a protein, but if you’re a big lump of meat like us, it’s just unintelligible,” explained James Millen, senior author of the study at KCL and a physicist. new scientist.

Applications of the future?

Because of the engine’s small size, it probably won’t end up in cars or home appliances, at least not anytime soon. Instead, the researchers envision more theoretical applications for their tiny powerhouse. For example, traps are ideal for simulating other microscopic phenomena, such as how proteins fold inside our bodies, driving various metabolic processes.

“Proteins fold in milliseconds, but atoms do [that] force them to move over nanoseconds,” explained Jonathan Pritchett, study co-author and a postdoctoral researcher at KCL, in the statement. By observing how the microparticles move and building a series of equations based on that, we can avoid this problem entirely.”

This is one example among many, the researchers added. As the engine shows, the physics of the microscopic world works in mysterious ways—mysteries that likely require microscopic tools to solve.