Related papers: Modeling Maxwell's demon with a microcanonical Szi…
Leo Szilard pointed out that Maxwell's demon can be replaced by machinery, thereby laying the foundation for understanding the physical nature of information. Szilard's information engine still serves as a canonical example after almost a…
Isothermal information engines operate by extracting net work from a single heat bath through measurement and feedback control. In this work, we analyze a realistic active Szilard engine operating on a single active particle by means of…
In his famous letter in 1870, Maxwell describes how Joule's law can be violated "only by the intelligent action of a mere guiding agent", later coined as Maxwell's demon by Lord Kelvin. In this letter we study thermodynamics of information…
We employ the recently developed framework of the energetics of stochastic processes (called `stochastic energetics'), to re-analyze the Carnot cycle in detail, taking account of fluctuations, without taking the thermodynamic limit. We find…
The limit of energy saving in the control of small systems has recently attracted much interest due to the concept refinement of the Maxwell demon. Inspired by a newly proposed set of fluctuation theorems, we report the first experimental…
Maxwell's demons work by rectifying thermal fluctuations. They are not expected to function at macroscopic scales where fluctuations become negligible and dynamics become deterministic. We propose an electronic implementation of an…
The paradox of Maxwell's demon motivated the development of information thermodynamics and the creation of nanoscale information engines. We now understand that machines such as the molecular motors within cells can in principle harvest…
In this theoretical study, we determine the maximum amount of work extractable in finite time by a demon performing continuous measurements on a quadratic Hamiltonian system subjected to thermal fluctuations, in terms of the information…
In the present paper, several issues concerning the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon and Landauer's principle are dealt with. I argue that if the demon and the system on which it operates without dissipation of external energy…
We review theory of information thermodynamics which incorporates effects of measurement and feedback into nonequilibrium thermodynamics of a small system, and discuss how the second law of thermodynamics should be extended for such…
In scenarios coined Maxwell's demon, information on microscopic degrees of freedom is used to seemingly violate the second law of thermodynamics. This has been studied in the classical as well as the quantum domain. In this paper, we study…
A Maxwell's demon type ``information engine" which extracts work from a bath is constructed from a microscopic Hamiltonian for the whole system including a subsystem, a thermal bath, and a nonequilibrium bath of phonons or photons which…
The Szilard engine (SZE) is the quintessence of Maxwell's demon, which can extract the work from a heat bath by utilizing information. We present the first complete quantum analysis of the SZE, and derive an analytic expression of the…
Maxwell demons are creatures that are imagined to be able to reduce the entropy of a system without performing any work on it. Conventionally, such a Maxwell demon's intricate action consists of measuring individual particles and…
We show how to use a central limit approximation for additive co-cycles to describe non-equilibrium and far from equilibrium thermodynamic behavior. We consider first two weakly coupled Hamiltonian dynamical systems initially at different…
An equation of state for an ideal gas with a small number of particles is studied. The resulting equation is found to differ from that expected in conventional thermodynamics, which is strikingly illustrated when considering the traditional…
According to Landauer's principle, erasure of information is the only part of a computation process that unavoidably involves energy dissipation. If done reversibly, such an erasure generates the minimal heat of $k_BT\ln 2$ per erased bit…
The gedanken experiment of Maxwell's demon has led to the studies concerning the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The demon measures fluctuations of a system's observable and converts the information gain into work…
We investigate thermodynamics of feedback processes driven by measurement. Regarding system and memory device as a composite system, mutual information as a measure of correlation between the two constituents contributes to the entropy of…
Recently Sagawa and Ueda [Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 080403 (2008)] derived a bound on the work that can be extracted from a quantum system with the use of feedback control. They left open the question of whether this bound could be achieved for…