  Many important processes at the microscale require far-from-equilibrium
conditions to occur, as in the functioning of mesoscopic bioreactors,
nanoscopic rotors, and nanoscale mass conveyors. Achieving such conditions,
however, is typically based on energy inputs that strongly affect the thermal
properties of the environment and the controllability of the system itself.
Here, we present a general class of far-from-equilibrium processes that
suppress the net thermal exchange with the environment by maintaining the
Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution intact. This new phenomenon, referred
to as ghost equilibrium, results from the statistical cancellation of
superheated and subcooled nonequilibrated degrees of freedom that are
autonomously generated through a microscale energy sorting process. We provide
general conditions to observe this phenomenon and study its implications for
manipulating energy at the microscale. The results are applied explicitly to
two mechanistically different cases, an ensemble of rotational dipoles and a
gas of trapped particles, which encompass a great variety of common situations
involving both rotational and translational degrees of freedom.
