Someone built a tiny engine that breaks a 'universal' rule of physics by being both powerful and incredibly precise at the same time.
March 23, 2026
Original Paper
Strong Violation of the Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation in a Minimal Autonomous Heat Engine
arXiv · 2603.20041
The Takeaway
The Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation is a rule stating that you can't have a small engine that is both highly precise and highly efficient. By using a 'pendulum-clock' mechanism, this team showed they could drive that limit to nearly zero, creating a nearly perfectly consistent engine.
From the abstract
Thermodynamic uncertainty relations (TURs) impose a universal trade-off between current precision and entropy production in autonomous steady states, constraining in particular the power, efficiency, and constancy of heat engines. We demonstrate strong violations of the long-time TUR in a minimal autonomous heat engine composed of a discrete ratchet generating work against a constant bias and an underdamped harmonic oscillator acting as an internal stochastic control. In the regime of time-scale