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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists are working on a heat engine that consists of just a single ion. Such a nano-heat engine could be far more efficient than, for example, a car engine or a coal-fired power plant. Scientists ...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — To evade friction, try taking a quantum shortcut. Two teams of physicists are building tiny machines designed to operate with the maximum possible efficiency. According to ...

Researchers at MIT have built a highly efficient thermophotovoltaic cell that, when paired with renewable resources, efficiently converts incoming photons—particles of light—to electricity. It’s an ...

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 ...