Szilard Engines and Information-Based Work Extraction for Active Systems

The out of equilibrium nature of active systems can be exploited for the design of information-basedengines. We design two types of an active Szilard engine that use a Maxwell demon to extract work from anactive bath composed of noninteracting active Brownian particles. The two engines exploit either thequasistatic active pressure of active Brownian particles or the long correlation time of their velocities. Forboth engines the active bath allows us to overcome the Landauer principle and to extract larger workcompared to conventional Szilard engines operating in quasithermal equilibrium. For both of our engines,we identify the optimal regimes at which the work extracted and the efficiency are maximized. Finally, wediscuss them in the context of synthetic and biological active systems