Scientists say they've made the world's tiniest engine - a million times smaller than an ant

Picture an ant. It's fuzzy, black and small, maybe half a centimetre long - and capable of carrying up to 50 times its own body weight. Now envision a powerful motor a million times smaller. (You can't, not really, but don't worry - the human brain wasn't designed that way.)

Scientists say they've made the world's tiniest engine - a million times smaller than an ant 1462280622621

Scientists say they've made the world's tiniest engine - a million times smaller than an ant 1462280622621

It's at this microscopic scale that scientists at the University of Cambridge say they've constructed a working engine. The prototype motor, which the physicists have described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relies on lasers, gold particles and the exploitation of a nifty physics principle called van der Waals forces.

The nanoscale engine works like this: Clumps of gold particles are embedded in a watery polymer gel, which the scientists blast with a laser for a brief moment. The laser heats up the gel, expelling the water as though wringing a sponge. Without the water to keep them separate, the gold particles cling together thanks to their mutual van der Waals attraction. (A van der Waals force is the relatively weak interaction between two neutral molecules - it's not as strong as the bond holding a water molecule together, but it's powerful enough to keep a gecko foot stuck to a glass plate.)

Once the gel cools, the polymer once again soaks up water. The gold particles violently snap apart. "It's like an explosion," said Tao Ding, an author of the paper and a researcher at Cambridge's experimental physics laboratory, in a statement. "We have hundreds of gold balls flying apart in a millionth of a second when water molecules inflate the polymers around them." The researchers believe that this cycle of constriction and expansion, like the oscillations of a spring or the pumps of a piston, could be used to power a nanomachine.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/scientists-say-theyve-made-the-worlds-tiniest-engine--a-million-times-smaller-than-an-ant-20160503-goli7e.html#ixzz47lLOwVyC

Scientists say they've made the world's tiniest engine - a million times smaller than an ant

Scientists say they've made the world's tiniest engine - a million times smaller than an ant

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