Physicists from Switzerland have created a molecular motor of 16 atoms

In Switzerland, physicists made the world’s smallest molecular engine of 16 atoms. The design of Samuel Stolz and his colleagues from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne includes a stator from a three-layer cluster of a compound of palladium with gallium and a rotor in the form of an adsorbed acetylene molecule. Acetylene rotates through quantum tunneling and classical kinetics. The study was written in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The motor consists of 16 atoms: a three-layer PdGa cluster of a palladium trimer layer, a layer of six gallium atoms, and another, the upper layer of three palladium atoms, on which a spinning part of a tetraatomic acetylene molecule is adsorbed.

Such miniature motors are needed to study the laws of physics at the micro-level. The smaller the machine of molecules, the greater the likelihood that a quantum effect will occur. In the case of Swiss scientists, scanning tunneling microscopy made it possible to study how the molecular rotor behaves.

The motor rotates in one direction under the influence of electrons. Scientists failed to explain why the movement is one way.