English

N-States Continuous Maxwell Demon

Statistical Mechanics 2023-05-11 v2

Abstract

Maxwell's demon is a famous thought experiment and a paradigm of the thermodynamics of information. It is related to Szilard's engine, a two-state information-to-work conversion device in which the demon performs single measurements and extracts work depending on the state measurement outcome. A variant of these models, the Continuous Maxwell Demon (CMD), was recently introduced by Ribezzi-Crivellari and Ritort where work was extracted every time τ\tau in a two state model. The CMD was able to extract unbounded amounts of work at the cost of an unbounded amount of information storage. In this work, we built a generalization of the CMD to the N-states case. We obtained generalized analytical expressions for the average work extracted and the information content. We show that the second law inequality for information-to-work conversion is fulfilled. We illustrate the results for N-states with uniform transition rates and for the N=3 case.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.05029,
  title  = {N-States Continuous Maxwell Demon},
  author = {Paul Raux and Felix Ritort},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.05029},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

15 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:29:10.582Z