The thermodynamic cost of measurements
Statistical Mechanics
2015-06-03 v1
Abstract
The measurement of thermal fluctuations provides information about the microscopic state of a thermodynamic system and can be used in order to extract work from a single heat bath in a suitable cyclic process. We present a minimal framework for the modeling of a measurement device and we propose a protocol for the measurement of thermal fluctuations. In this framework, the measurement of thermal fluctuations naturally leads to the dissipation of work. We illustrate this framework on a simple two states system inspired by the Szilard's information engine.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1112.0462,
title = {The thermodynamic cost of measurements},
author = {Léo Granger and Holger Kantz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1112.0462},
year = {2015}
}