A micrometer-sized isothermal stirling engine operating between engineered reservoirs

Abstract

Miniaturization is a key driver of present day science and technology. Apart from electronic devices and memory chips, machines with movable parts are also at the frontier of miniaturization. Some of the most exotic applications of such tiny mechanical machines could be from collective robotics to micron-sized robot surgeons inside human bodies. At small enough length scales, the physical construction and the properties of such small machines are di erent from their macroscopic counterparts. Although the concept of miniaturization of mechanical machines was rst introduced by Prof. Richard Feynman during his lecture called \Tiny Machines" in 1984 [27, 26], only recently it has been made possible to experimentally realise some simple mechanical machines at very small length scales such as a single colloid or even a single atom [2, 29, 21, 18, 4, 14, 28, 17].