In the world of science, saying that something will never happen is almost a good joke, for better or for worse, because it never ceases to amaze us. Now, a nanoparticle has defied the laws of thermodynamics , specifically the second, by being able to transfer heat to an even hotter gas. The results of the work have been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology .
The study, led by a team of physicists from the Barcelona Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Switzerland) and the University of Vienna (Austria), has achieved that the probability of events can be accurately predicted that temporarily violate the second law of thermodynamics.
This physical law explains that the entropy (which indicates the degree of molecular disorder of a system) of a system never decreases spontaneously , thus favoring disorder (high entropy) over order (low entropy). This, which is clearly impossible at the time and length scales of the human world, is impossible in the microscopic world .
The scientists succeeded in causing a nanoparticle trapped by laser light to temporarily violate the second law of thermodynamics . To do this, they used a small glass sphere 100 nanometers in diameter, capturing it and making it levitate using laser light. Thanks to collisions with gas molecules, the nanosphere kept moving. After this, they managed to cool the nanosphere below the temperature of that gas to make it unstable.
After turning off the cooling, the nanoparticle increased in temperature due to the transfer of energy from the gas molecules to the nanosphere itself. At the same time, they observed that the nanosphere did not always behave as it should according to the second law of thermodynamics, since instead of absorbing heat, it released it to the gas, confirming that the second law of thermodynamics has limitations and that it must be subjected to review.
Image Credit: Iñaki Gonzalez and Jan Gieseler
