Related papers: What Maxwell's demon could do for you
A demonic being, introduced by Maxwell, to miraculously create thermal non-equilibrium and violate the Second law of thermodynamics, has been among the most intriguing and elusive wishful concepts for over 150 years. Maxwell and his…
Mechanical Maxwell's demons, such as Smoluchowski's trapdoor and Feynman's ratchet and pawl need external energy source to operate. If you cease to feed a demon the Second Law of thermodynamics will quickly stop its operation. Nevertheless,…
Maxwell's demon was created with abilities to violate the second law of thermodynamics. But the demon always fell short of doing so because of the imposed restrictive condition that reads, the demon needs to do "work". Therefore, you can…
This work provides an overview of key historical developments in the formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, focusing on the notorious challenge of ``Maxwell's Demon'', a hypothetical creature who could presumably violate that law.…
A Maxwell's demon is a device that gets information and trades it in for thermodynamic advantage, in apparent (but not actual) contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. Quantum-mechanical versions of Maxwell's demon exhibit…
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…
The problem of possible violation of the second law of thermodynamics is discussed. It is noted that the task of the well known challenge to the second law called Maxwell's demon is put in order a chaotic perpetual motion and if any ordered…
Using classical thermodynamics, we argue that Maxwell's demon loses its battle against Clausius as any temperature difference or other thermodynamic forces it creates is immediately compensated by spontaneous counterbalancing flows that…
Emerging evidence suggests that physical systems operating as Maxwell demons, in which some subsystem of a larger system extracts heat energy from its environment in an apparent local violation of the second law, are commonplace throughout…
Starting from 2002, at least two kinds of laboratory-testable, solid-state Maxwell demons have been proposed that utilize the electric field energy of an open-gap n-p junction and that seem to challenge the validity of the Second Law of…
A tantalizing version of Maxwell's demon is presented which appears to operate reversibly. A container of hard core disks is separated into two chambers of equal volume by a membrane that selects which disk can penetrate depending on the…
It is nearly 150 years since Maxwell challenged the validity of the second law of thermodynamics by imagining a tiny creature who could sort the molecules of a gas in such a way that would decrease entropy without exerting any work. 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 argue that Maxwell's demon is incapable of creating a nonzero temperature difference. Hence, it does not destroy equilibrium and the second law is never at risk, contrary to the claim by Maxwell and accepted by many. It is therefore…
Maxwell's demon was born in 1867 and still thrives in modern physics. He plays important roles in clarifying the connections between two theories: thermodynamics and information. Here, we present the history of the demon and a variety of…
With a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems undergoing, respectively, quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths at different stages of a cycle, we are able to clarify some…
The second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic in nature. Its formulation requires that the state of a system be described by a probability distribution. A natural question, thereby, arises as to whether a prior knowledge about the state…
The birth, life, and death of Maxwell's demon provoked a profound discussion about the interplay between thermodynamics, computation, and information. Even after its exorcism, the demon continues to inspire a multidisciplinary field. This…
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…
Thought experiments like Maxwell's Demon or the Feynman-Smoluchowski Ratchet can help in pursuing the microscopic origin of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Here we present a more sophisticated physical system than a ratchet, consisting of…