Related papers: Maxwell's Demon and Data Compression
The most succinct manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics is the limitation the Landauer principle imposes on the amount of heat a Maxwell demon (MD) can convert into free energy per single bit of information obtained in a…
Time-dependent protocols that perform irreversible logical operations, such as memory erasure, cost work and produce heat, placing bounds on the efficiency of computers. Here we use a prototypical computer model of a physical memory to show…
The Landauer principle establishes a fundamental lower bound on the energetic cost of the erasure of a one-bit memory in thermal equilibrium. Here, we experimentally demonstrate how this bound can be effectively circumvented by introducing…
Framing computation as the transformation of metastable memories, we explore its fundamental thermodynamic limits. The true power of information follows from a novel decomposition of nonequilibrium free energy derived here, which provides a…
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…
We consider a feedback control loop rectifying particle transport through a single quantum dot that is coupled to two electronic leads. While monitoring the occupation of the dot, we apply conditional control operations by changing the…
Thermodynamics establishes that information acquired through measurement can be converted into work, as exemplified by Maxwell's demon and Szilard engines. Most experimental realizations of information engines, however, implicitly assume…
We present a computational model for Szilard's engine and the information discarding process. Taking advantage of a fact that the one is essentially the reversed cycle of the other, we can discuss the both by employing the same model.…
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…
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…
We have simulated numerically an automated version of Maxwell's demon inspired by Smoluchowski's ideas of 1912. Two gas chambers of equal volume are connected via an opening that is covered by a trapdoor. The trapdoor can open to the left…
The relation between the theory of entanglement and thermodynamics is very tight: a thermodynamic theory of quantum entanglement, as well as the establishment of rigorous formal connections between the laws of thermodynamics and the…
We demonstrate that Shannon's information entropy and the thermodynamic entropy of Boltzmann and Gibbs are quantitatively equivalent for real condensed-matter systems. By interpreting atomic configurations as information sources, we compute…
We identify that quantum coherence is a valuable resource in the quantum heat engine, which is designed in a quantum thermodynamic cycle assisted by a quantum Maxwell's demon. This demon is in a superposed state. The quantum work and heat…
We look at certain thought experiments based upon the 'delayed choice' and 'quantum eraser' interference experiments, which present a complementarity between information gathered from a quantum measurement and interference effects. It has…
We discuss work extraction from classical information engines (e.g., Szil\'ard) with $N$-particles, $q$ partitions, and initial arbitrary non-equilibrium states. In particular, we focus on their {\em optimal} behaviour, which includes the…
This paper revisits the Maxwell Demon Problem. Representing the demon with a simple physical computer composed of a single memory element, we demonstrate that the average minimum entropy increase of the universe due to sorting of particles…
We compute the entropy reduction in feedback controlled systems due to the repeated operation of the controller. This was the lacking ingredient to establish the thermodynamics of these systems, and in particular of Maxwell's demons. We…
Measurements --- interactions which establish correlations between a system and a recording device --- can be made thermodynamically reversible. One might be concerned that such reversibility will make the second law of thermodynamics…
Nanomachines are often interpreted as autonomous Maxwell's demons or information engines. This interpretation is appealing from a conceptual viewpoint but sometimes lacks a rigorous and precise formulation. Moreover, it is unclear whether…