Scientists Just Built The World's Smallest Engine 73,000 Times Smaller Than A Hair

A team of physicists has created the smallest engine in the world. It’s only as small as a calcium ion, equivalent to 10 billion times smaller than the automobile engine.

The application for this tiny engine won’t likely be for your car or motorbike. Instead, it may help lay the foundation for nanotechnologies.

About how the engine works, the calcium ion spins due to an electrical charge that it holds. Then, this angular momentum is used for converting heat from a laser beam into vibrations.

Then, the vibrations act as a flywheel that can store rotational energy. Study’s co-author Mark Mitchison said:

“The flywheel allows us to actually measure the power output of an atomic-scale motor, resolving single [quantum-scale unit] of energy, for the first time.”

To help you imagine more easily, look at just one hair on your head, its size is from 17 to 181 micrometers. To compare, this newly created engine is 73,000 times as small as your hair.

However, this is not the first time a calcium ion engine’s been built. In 2014, a team of physicists in Germany created a machine that runs on a single atom.

It appears that after building big machines with massive power, the science world is moving to nanotechnologies with efforts to shrink the size the machines, robots, and engines. Some are so small that they can even wander around in the human body freely. In 2016, the University of Cambridge created a tiny engine consisting of charged gold nanoparticles that are clustered together. The machine could be used in nanomachines to attack viruses in human blood.

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