The breakthrough redefines how physicists imagine engine builds.
Technically speaking, an engine is a device that converts some form of energy into mechanical energy. Taking that definition to heart, physicists harnessed the strange rules of microscopic physics and created the hottest engine ever—which also happens to be the smallest engine ever made.
In a forthcoming paper for Physical Review Letters, researchers describe a tiny engine crammed inside a microscopic particle trapped in electrical limbo. Using this setup, the engine reportedly achieved a temperature of 10 million Kelvins, or about 18 million degrees Fahrenheit—colder than the Sun’s core (27 million degrees F) but much hotter than the corona (up to 3.5 million degrees F).
“By getting to grips with thermodynamics at this unintuitive level, we can design better engines in the future and experiments which challenge our understanding of nature,” Molly Message, study lead author and a PhD student at King’s College London (KCL) in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.
