World’s Smallest Engine – Ten Billion Times Smaller Than A Car Engine – Created By Physicists

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – An international team of physicists has built the world’s smallest engine – which, as a single calcium ion, is approximately ten billion times smaller than a car engine.

The engine itself – a single calcium ion – is electrically charged, which makes it easy to trap using electric fields. The working substance of the engine is the ion’s intrinsic “spin” (its angular momentum).

This spin is used to convert heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations, or vibrations, of the trapped ion.

These vibrations act like a “flywheel”, which captures the useful energy generated by the engine. This energy is stored in discrete units called “quanta”, as predicted by quantum mechanics.

 “The flywheel allows us to actually measure the power output of an atomic-scale motor, resolving single quanta of energy, for the first time,”  Dr Mark Mitchison of the QuSys group at Trinity, and one of the article’s co-authors said in a press release.

In the future, such devices could be incorporated into other technologies in order to recycle waste heat and thus improve energy efficiency.

A similar calcium ion engine,  less than a micrometer in length and using only a single atom to run, was created by a team of German physicists a few years ago and reported in a research paper.

Paper

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff