Physicists have proposed a way to get their quantum motor running. An electric motor could be built from just two atoms held in a ring by lasers, a theoretical study published online June 8 in Physical Review Letters contends.
The new motor proposal “might be hard to implement, but it has the core of a good idea,” comments Ian Spielman, a physicist at the Joint Quantum Institute in College Park, Md.
Electrical motors, like the ones in fans, convert electric current into mechanical motion, such as spinning blades. “The idea of a quantum motor is exactly the same as a mechanical motor,” says study coauthor Alexey Ponomarev of the University of Augsburg in Germany. “You have an electromagnetic force that launches it.”