Author: Emily Conover / Source: Science News
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 more power than a standard, or classical, engine under the same conditions, scientists report in the March 22 Physical Review Letters.
“They’ve shown very convincingly that the quantum machine performs better than the classical,” says physicist Mark Mitchison of Trinity College Dublin. “It’s a very important step forward.”
The device is a type of engine called a heat engine. Traditional heat engines turn heat into motion. For example, a car’s internal combustion engine burns fuel to move pistons up and down, resulting in the car moving forward. Other heat engines have boasted power increases. But those machines relied on tweaks to the environment outside the main machine — for example, the machine’s heat source may have been imbued with beneficial properties — so the extra power wasn’t entirely a feature of the machine itself.
In the new study, the quantum engine works not by igniting gasoline, but by using a laser to cause an electron within a tiny defect of…
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