Non-Hermitian Maxwell's Demon

Abstract

Maxwell's demon was first introduced by Maxwell in 1871 to discuss the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics due to addition information flow. In this paper, an alternative type of Maxwell's demon -- non-Hermitian Maxwell's demon is uncovered that shows quite different properties as the original Maxwell's demon and leads to rich physics phenomena in non-Hermitian systems, such as mismatch between single-body and many-body properties, Bose-Einstein condensation at arbitrary high temperature, phase transition that violates the Goldstone theorem. This provides an alternative degree of freedom to tune quantum many-body systems and realize exotic quantum phases and phase transitions