They're making motors at the atomic level now.
The smallest motor in the world is only 16 atoms in size now.
Due to Quantum Tunneling effects, this is about as small as a motor can get.
You can fit about 100k of these robots in the width of a human hair.
They're smaller than the helper molecules our bodies' cells have in them
You're hearing this right, people, they're making atomic robots
It's rotor is only 4 atoms wide, and you can see it in action in the webm time-lapse.
There are 10 seconds in between the frames.
The motor can be powered with tiny electric currents and it has to be pretty cold for it to reliably spin in one direction. Like -428°F.
When it gets warmer, the rotation direction becomes more random.
The Swiss scientists responsible for it's development are trying to figure out how to use this thing for sub-atomic energy harvesting.
That would make the robots get bigger and bigger as they harvest things. AKA tiny robots that grow and become more powerful depending on what they are harvesting
It's rudimentary, it's imperfect, and it's limited by Quantum Tunneling, which is beyond our Earthly capabilities right now.
But they're working on it. They've built functional models and They're getting closer and closer to the solutions to this thing's limitations.
Molecular motor crossing the frontier of classical to quantum tunneling motion
Significance
Conversion of undirected energy input into directed motion on molecular scales is the basis for controlled movements in living organisms. In this context, fundamental insights can be obtained by investigating artificial molecular machines under well-defined conditions. We devised the currently smallest, atomically precise molecular machine, whose rotor (C2H2) consists of just four atoms and whose functioning we have tracked employing scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Unlike all other reported surface-anchored rotors, ours is characterized by an extremely high degree of directionality which is independent of STM-tip condition or position, therefore solely defined by the chiral support. Owing to its ultrasmall size, our rotor’s operation crosses the well-established classical to an unanticipated quantum tunneling kinetic regime without loss in directionality.
Abstract
The reliability by which molecular motor proteins convert undirected energy input into directed motion or transport has inspired the design of innumerable artificial molecular motors. We have realized and investigated an artificial molecular motor applying scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), which consists of a single acetylene (C2H2) rotor anchored to a chiral atomic cluster provided by a PdGa(111) surface that acts as a stator. By breaking spatial inversion symmetry, the stator defines the unique sense of rotation. While thermally activated motion is nondirected, inelastic electron tunneling triggers rotations, where the degree of directionality depends on the magnitude of the STM bias voltage. Below 17 K and 30-mV bias voltage, a constant rotation frequency is observed which bears the fundamental characteristics of quantum tunneling. The concomitantly high directionality, exceeding 97%, implicates the combination of quantum and nonequilibrium processes in this regime, being the hallmark of macroscopic quantum tunneling. The acetylene on PdGa(111) motor therefore pushes molecular machines to their extreme limits, not just in terms of size, but also regarding structural precision, degree of directionality, and cross-over from classical motion to quantum tunneling. This ultrasmall motor thus opens the possibility to investigate in operando effects and origins of energy dissipation during tunneling events, and, ultimately, energy harvesting at the atomic scales.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14838
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14838/tab-figures-data