Worlds hottest tiny engine runs hotter than Suns Corona

Researchers channeled the strange rules of microscopic physics and created the high-performance engine, which also happens to be the smallest ever made.

For that purpose, they describe a tiny engine housed inside a microscopic particle confined in electrical limbo.

The engine reportedly achieved a temperature of 10 million Kelvins (about 18 million degrees Fahrenheit)-colder than the Sun’s core but much hotter than the corona, which is up to 3.5 million degrees F.

The study lead author and a PhD student at King’s College London (KCL) in the United Kingdom said in a statement, "By getting to grips with thermodynamics at this unintuitive level we can design better engines in the future and experiments that challenge our understanding of nature."

It has been observed that in the engine, electrodes trap and hover the micro-particle in a near-vacuum setup called a Paul trap.

However, when the researchers applied a noisy voltage to the electrodes, the particles started to convulse, which caused a rise in temperature for the entire system.

The desired results were unfolding, and the engine fluctuated between being effective and utterly defying the basic laws of thermodynamics.

While in some cycles, the engine’s power output surpassed the energy it consumed as the experiment showed the limitations of classical thermodynamics, researchers acknowledged this was due to fluctuations at the nanoscale.

The researchers analyzed that the engine randomly cooled down under conditions that should have made it hotter.

This was probably due to unforeseen influences at play and given the tiny size of the system.

Study senior author James Millen said, "We can see all these thermodynamics behaviors, which are totally intuitive if you are a bacterium or a protein but completely unintuitive if you are a big lump of meat like us."

Perhaps due to the engine's small size, it likely won't end up in cars or household appliances, at least not in the near future.

The researchers proposed more theoretical applications for their small powerhouse.

For instance, the trap is perfect for studying other microscopic phenomena such as how proteins fold inside our body which drives distinct metabolic processes.

Jonathan Pritchett said in a statement, "These divergent timescales make it very difficult for a computer to model them. By just observing how the microparticle moves and working out a series of questions based on that, we avoid this problem entirely."

The study demonstrates that the physics of the microscope world would work in unintuitive ways, and this research serves as an experiment to explore the fundamental laws of thermodynamics at the nanoscale.