Isothermal Maxwell daemon: Swing (fish-trap) model of particle pumping

Vladislav Čápek, Jiří Bok

A recently suggested simple model of an open microscopic system interacting with a bath and behaving like an isothermal Maxwell daemon is simplified and treated numerically. Results obtained confirm expectations that the system can, at the cost of thermal energy of the bath, spontaneously and in a cyclic process, pump particles from a particle reservoir to states with even higher energy. This contradicts the usual opinion based on the second law of macroscopic thermodynamics. For this effect, the interaction with the bath cannot be treated as weak. The role of dephasing owing to this interaction is illustrated.

Malcolm H. MacGregor

Eugene R. Marshalek

Vladislav Čápek

An open quantum model of a small system strongly interacting with a thermodynamic bath is suggested which binds cyclically, upon working in isothermal conditions, particles (atoms, molecules or molecular groups) to bound states. The latter may be even energetically disadvantageous. The effect is due to relaxation processes in intermediate states upon combined scattering of the particles on the system and can be viewed as an induced self-organization described here by a linear theory.

Roy J. Glauber

Vladislav Čápek