Physicists in the Netherlands have built a heat engine that might be the tiniest ever created. Based on “piezoresistive” silicon, and smaller than a typical biological cell, the engine could find ...

A tiny, particle-sized engine that runs at temperatures approaching the innermost core of the Sun could open a window into the smallest extremes of thermodynamics. By levitating a single particle of ...

A long-standing law of thermodynamics turns out to have a loophole at the smallest scales. Researchers have shown that quantum engines made of correlated particles can exceed the traditional ...

The heat engine works as its intrinsic spin converts heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations of a trapped ion. Credit: John Goold, Trinity College Dublin A new heat engine made from a ...

For the first time, a quantum engine has outperformed its traditional equivalent, without any special tweaks to its environment. The device harnesses the weird physics of very small objects to produce ...