The introduction of heat engines at the end of the 18th century transformed society by enabling large-scale conversions of heat into mechanical work. More recently, scientists have built microscale engines, unveiling new and fascinating phenomena. In this microrealm where fluctuations dominate, heat and work no longer behave deterministically but stochastically. Understanding the physics underlying these tiny engines could provide insight into a wide range of microscale machines, such as molecular motors, cellular factories, and nanoscale sensors. Now Molly Message from King’s College London and her colleagues have built and studied a tiny engine in the form of a levitated glass microparticle [1]. By tailoring the trapping electric fields, the team produced effective temperatures of the order of 10 million kelvins, comparable to the conditions in the core of the Sun. In this extreme regime, the researchers encountered some counterintuitive thermodynamic phenomena, which may help explain the nonequilibrium behavior of various biological systems.
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