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A glass bead with a diameter of five micrometers was recently used by scientists to create a miniature engine that was exposed to an electric field. After being thrown about, the bead's total energy escalated to an effective temperature of around 13 million degrees Celsius, which is roughly a billion times lower than the Sun's interior. You wouldn't burn because this heat is actually just in motion. On a micro level, this peculiar configuration illuminates some strange thermodynamics.
tiny heat engine that levitates
The paper claims that scientists used an electromagnetic field to confine a 5-micrometer glass sphere in a vacuum before applying an oscillating voltage to cause it to jitter uncontrollably. Even though the bead itself remained close to room temperature, this motion gave the sphere a "effective temperature" of almost 13 million °C, which is comparable to the Sun's core. According to the scientists, this "heat" is entirely kinetic: the sphere travels "as if you had put this object into a gas that was that hot," according to study coauthor and physicist James Millen of King's College London.
Unusual microscale thermodynamics
The levitated bead is seen by researchers as a heat engine. Its ratio of hot to cold temperatures (approximately 100:1) is significantly higher than that of typical engines (around 3:1). The efficiency of the gadget also fluctuated greatly, occasionally exceeding 100% or even momentarily operating in reverse, demonstrating the unpredictability of microscale thermodynamics. Such studies might provide insight into the functioning of microscopic natural "machines" (such the motor protein kinesin) under comparable jostling circumstances. The levitated sphere provides a suitable analogy for scientists to investigate small heat engines, but it is not intended to drive anything practical.
