Trapped in an electric field, it shows bizarre thermodynamics at microscopic scales, offering insights into natural molecular engines.
Scientists created a glass-bead nano engine mimicking 13 million°C, revealing new thermodynamic behaviors
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Recently scientists have constructed a tiny engine made of a glass bead that is 5 micrometre in diameter and placed it within an electric field. The total energy of the bead was shaken about, and its total energy increased to the level of an effective temperature of approximately 13 million degree Celsius, approximately a billion times colder than the interior of the Sun. In real sense this heat is just in motion and therefore you would not burn. This eccentric arrangement enlightens some bizarre thermodynamics on a micro level.
Tiny levitated heat engine
According to the study, researchers trapped a 5-micrometre glass sphere in a vacuum via an electric field and then applied an oscillating voltage to make it jitter violently. This motion gave the sphere an “effective temperature” of around 13 million °C– similar to the Sun’s core – even though the bead itself stayed near room temperature. The team explains that this ‘heat’ is purely kinetic: as physicist James Millen of King’s College London, a coauthor of the study, puts it, the sphere moves “as if you had put this object into a gas that was that hot”.
Unusual thermodynamics at the microscale
Researchers treat the levitated bead as a heat engine. Its hot–cold temperature ratio (around 100:1) far exceeds that of normal engines (about 3:1). The device’s efficiency also varied wildly – sometimes over 100% or even briefly running in reverse – illustrating how unpredictable microscale thermodynamics can be. Such experiments may reveal how tiny natural ‘machines’ work (for example, the motor protein kinesin) under similar jostling conditions. The levitated sphere itself isn’t meant to drive anything useful; it’s a perfect analogue for scientists to explore tiny heat engines.
