麻豆淫院

Scientists have created the world's hottest engine running at temperatures hotter than those reached in the sun's core. The team from King's College London and collaborators believe their platform could provide an unparalleled understanding of the laws of thermodynamics on a small scale, and provide the foundation for a new, efficient way to compute how proteins fold鈥攖he subject of last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Outlined in , the engine is a very small, microscopic particle suspended at a low pressure using electrical fields. This electric trap is called a Paul Trap. The researchers can exponentially increase the heat of the trapped particle by applying a noisy voltage to one of the electrodes levitating it.

While traditionally engines have been associated with motors, in science their definition is much simpler鈥攅ngines convert one form of energy to mechanical energy. Here, that is heat to movement.

The experiment is the first ever to push temperatures that high on such a small scale, and the team found that their results often contradicted the basic laws of thermodynamics. They found that for a given engine run, when exposed to warmer temperatures, the system would sometimes cool down as opposed to heat up, as expected. This is due to the normally undetectable random influence of thermal fluctuations in the surrounding environment affecting dynamics in a way that is unique to the microscale and below.

Molly Message, a Ph.D. student at the Department of 麻豆淫院ics at King's College London and first author of the paper, said, "Engines and the types of energy transfer that occur within them are a microcosm of the wider universe. Studying the steam engine brought about the field thermodynamics, which in turn revealed some of the fundamental laws of physics. The continued study of engines into new regimes offers the potential to expand our understanding of the universe and the processes that drive its development."

"By getting to grips with thermodynamics at this unintuitive level, we can design better engines in the future and experiments which challenge our understanding of nature."

The team also hope that the platform can be used as an analog computer to predict how proteins fold and assemble themselves.

Analog computers are direct, physical simulations of the system you are trying to model and can be found as far back as the .

"Proteins are the engines that power most of the important processes in our body, so understanding their mechanics and how that can go wrong is a vital step in understanding disease and how it can be treated," notes Dr. Jonathan Pritchett, Postdoctoral Research Associate at King's.

"The advantage of our method over conventional digital models like AlphaFold is ease. Proteins fold over milliseconds, but the atoms which make them, move over nanoseconds. These divergent timescales make it very difficult for a computer to model them. By just observing how the microparticle moves and working out a series of equations based on that, we avoid this problem entirely."

The team hope this new method could also use less energy and be more sustainable than methods that rely on digital computers.