Composite Particles and the Szilard Engine

Abstract

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 extract more work out of elementary boson than out of elementary fermions. In this paper, we consider the amount of work that can be extracted out of a system of composite particles -- particles which are composed of two interacting elementary fermions of different species. We demonstrate that the amount of work extracted is closely tied to the amount of entanglement within the composite particles