{"id":127084,"date":"2021-09-01T23:24:54","date_gmt":"2021-09-02T06:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/the-smallest-engine-in-the-world-is-literally-an-ion"},"modified":"2021-09-01T23:24:54","modified_gmt":"2021-09-02T06:24:54","slug":"the-smallest-engine-in-the-world-is-literally-an-ion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/the-smallest-engine-in-the-world-is-literally-an-ion","title":{"rendered":"The Smallest Engine in the World Is Literally an Ion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-smallest-engine-in-the-world-is-literally-an-ion.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Circa 2019<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>An international team of physicists have created what they\u2019re calling the world\u2019s smallest engine. How small is it? The entire engine is a single calcium ion, making it around 10 <em>billion<\/em> times smaller than a car engine.<\/p>\n<p>The experimental engine was conceived by an international team led by Professor Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler and Ulrich Poschinger of <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.quantenbit.physik.uni-mainz.de\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" data-vars-ga-outbound-link=\"https:\/\/www.quantenbit.physik.uni-mainz.de\/\">Johannes Gutenberg University<\/a> in Mainz, Germany. The engine is electrically charged, which makes it easy to trap using electric fields. The moving parts of the engine are the ion\u2019s \u201cintrinsic spin.\u201d On an atomic level, spin is a measurement of an atom\u2019s <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/what-is-angular-momentum\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" data-vars-ga-outbound-link=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/what-is-angular-momentum\/\">angular momentum<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Within the engine, spin is used to capture and convert heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations, or vibrations, of the trapped ion. The vibrations act as a flywheel and its energy is placed into units called \u201cquanta,\u201d predicted by quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Circa 2019 An international team of physicists have created what they\u2019re calling the world\u2019s smallest engine. How small is it? The entire engine is a single calcium ion, making it around 10 billion times smaller than a car engine. The experimental engine was conceived by an international team led by Professor Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler and Ulrich [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}