Work and information processing in a solvable model of Maxwell's demon
Statistical Mechanics
2012-08-10 v1 History and Philosophy of Physics
Abstract
We describe a minimal model of an autonomous Maxwell demon, a device that delivers work by rectifying thermal fluctuations while simultaneously writing information to a memory register. We solve exactly for the steady-state behavior of our model, and we construct its phase diagram. We find that our device can also act as a "Landauer eraser", using externally supplied work to remove information from the memory register. By exposing an explicit, transparent mechanism of operation, our model offers a simple paradigm for investigating the thermodynamics of information processing by small systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1206.5553,
title = {Work and information processing in a solvable model of Maxwell's demon},
author = {Dibyendu Mandal and Christopher Jarzynski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.5553},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
Main Text (6 pages, 3 figures) + Suppl. Info. (3 pages). To appear in PNAS