Microcanonical Szilárd engines and spontaneous symmetry breaking

Abstract

In 1929, L. Szilárd reformulated the famous proposal by Maxwell concerning the violation of the second Law of thermodynamics. In the now well-know Szilárd engine, the Maxwell's demon extracts energy from a single thermal bath in cyclic process which is based on the information he gathered about the system. In the last fifteen years, an intense scientific activity has been devoted to the understanding of the thermodynamics of such feedback process, resulting for instance in generalised forms of the second Law. It has been claimed in the literature that the physical mechanism underlying the energy extraction is a spontaneous symmetry breaking induced either by the measurement or by the manipulation performed by the demon. In the present proposal, we aim at understanding the role of symmetry breaking in the so-called microcanonical Szilárd engines. Our main goal is to construct more realistic and complex models of such engines since those available in the literature so far are restrict to the quasi static manipulation of systems with one degree of freedom. (AU)