University of Rochester has been granted a three-year, $1 million grant from the Templeton Foundation to research quantum measurement engines which use the principles of quantum mechanics to run with 100 percent efficiency.
Quantum measurement engines may work in microscopic environments for very small power tasks such as moving around an atom or charging a miniaturized circuit. They may be important components for quantum computers.
The power in a quantum measurement engine is measured in the unit picowatts, with one picowatt equal to one million millionths of a watt. One way to make quantum measurement engines for human-scale activities may be through massive parallelization, by making billions of them working together.
The team will also investigate another major area of research: how it might be possible to extract work from a system using entanglement as a fuel. Using entanglement as a fuel has the possibly revolutionary feature of creating a non-local engine; half of an engine could be in Location A, while the other half could be in Location B. The energy would not be held by either half of the system, yet the two parts could still share energy to fuel both halves proficiently. (SciTechDaily)