Related papers: Cooling classical particles with a microcanonical …

We discuss the possibility of extracting energy from a single thermal bath using microcanonical Szil\'ard engines operating in finite time. This extends previous works on the topic which are restricted to the quasistatic regime. The…

Following recent work by Marathe and Parrondo [PRL, 104, 245704 (2010)], we construct a classical Hamiltonian system whose energy is reduced during the adiabatic cycling of external parameters, when initial conditions are sampled…

Inspired by the available examples of Microcanonical Szil\'ard Engines and by the original Szil\'ard Engine, we devise a system with two degrees of freedom whose ensemble average energy, starting with a microcanical ensemble, decreases…

A Szilard Engine is a hypothetical device which is able to extract work from a single thermal reservoir by measuring the position of particles within the engine. We derive the amount of work that can be extracted from such a device in the…

Szil\'ard's information engine is a canonical example in the field of thermodynamics of information. We realize experimentally a macroscopic many-particle Szil\'ard engine that consists of active particles and use it to lift a mass against…

The Szilard engine is the simplest possible engine, composed only of one or more particles in a box. The box is then immersed in a heat bath and partitioned into two parts by a wall. It is known that in the cold temperature limit, one may…

We determine the maximal work extractable via a cyclic Hamiltonian process from a positive-temperature ($T>0$) microcanonical state of a $N\gg 1$ spin bath. The work is much smaller than the total energy of the bath, but can be still much…

Isothermal information engines operate by extracting net work from a single heat bath through measurement and feedback control. In this work, we analyze a realistic active Szilard engine operating on a single active particle by means of…

In a recent paper [Vaikuntanathan and Jarzynski, Phys. Rev. E {\bf 83}, 061120 (2011), arXiv:1105.1744] a model was introduced whereby work could be extracted from a thermal bath by measuring the energy of a particle that was thermalized by…

We introduce a new class of mesoscopic heat engines consisting of a tunnel junction coupled to a linear thermal bath. Work is produced by transporting electrons up against a voltage bias like in ordinary thermoelectrics but heat is…

A crucial step in the operation of the Szilard engine is the isothermal expansion of a single particle system. This expansion, seemingly a natural consequence, is unable to proceed when the piston is considered appropriately to be a thermal…

We present a thermodynamic analysis of a quantum engine that uses a single quantum particle as its working fluid, inspired by Szilard's classical single-particle engine. Our design is modeled after the classically-chaotic Szilard Map and…

We propose a variation of the classical Szilard engine that uses a porous piston. Such an engine requires neither information about the position of the particle, nor the removal and subsequent insertion of the piston when resetting the…

We analyze an engine whose working fluid consists of a single quantum particle, paralleling Szilard's construction of a classical single-particle engine. Following his resolution of Maxwell's Second Law paradox using the latter, which…

A colloidal particle embedded in a fluid can be used as a microscopic heat engine by means of a sequence of cyclic transformations imposed by an optical trap. We investigate a model for the operation of such kind of Brownian engines when…

We present a computational model for Szilard's engine and the information discarding process. Taking advantage of a fact that the one is essentially the reversed cycle of the other, we can discuss the both by employing the same model.…

We compare phase transition(-like) phenomena in small model systems for both microcanonical and canonical ensembles. The model systems correspond to a few classical (non-quantum) point particles confined in a one-dimensional box and…

We study the unitary time evolution of a simple quantum Hamiltonian describing a heat engine coupled to two heat baths. The engine is modeled as a three-level system. Each heat bath consists of a single harmonic oscillator. The engine is…

We introduce a class of thermal operations based on the collision model, where the system sequentially interacts with uncorrelated bath molecules via energy-preserving unitaries. To ensure finite complexity, each molecule is constrained to…

In a classic thought experiment, Szilard suggested a heat engine where a single particle, for example an atom or a molecule, is confined in a container coupled to a single heat bath. The container can be separated into two parts by a…