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 ...

The smaller the better, and in a world of fast-developing technology, that’s called innovation. Just this month, a desk-sized turbine capable of powering a small town was announced to be under ...

Researchers at Rice University have found a new way to improve a key element of thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems, which convert heat into electricity via light. Using an unconventional approach ...

Tabletop experiments by Indian physicists have broken a barrier proposed 200 years ago by a legendary French engineer, Sadi Carnot, raising hopes of new high-efficiency heat engines hitherto ...

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 ...