Scientists develop tiny engine that’s hotter than the Sun

Think for a moment about the hottest thing you know. You might picture the Sun, blazing above us with a heat that shapes every second of our lives. Now imagine something far smaller than a speck of dust reaching temperatures that leave even the Sun behind.

It sounds like a trick of science fiction, yet it is happening inside a London laboratory. A single particle, held in place by electric fields, has become an engine so extreme that it forces us to rethink how heat behaves when the world shrinks to the microscopic.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at King's College London built what may be the world's hottest engine. It is a single silica particle, suspended in a Paul Trap and held at low pressure.

The particle measures just under five micrometres across. By applying a noisy voltage to one of the electrodes that levitates it, the team raised its temperature to nearly 10 million Kelvin. It is an extraordinary figure, far beyond the solar surface and edging toward the star's own core.

The purpose is not spectacle. The team wanted to examine how thermodynamics behaves at very small scales.

Molly Message, the PhD student who led the work, described engines as mirrors of the wider universe. Steam engines once revealed the laws that govern heat and energy. Now this tiny engine may do the same for microscopic physics.

The team hopes the platform could help model protein folding, a process vital to life. If successful, this minuscule engine may guide both future machinery and future medicine, all from its glowing point of light.