Related papers: The Demon in a vacuum tube
This is another approach to realize Maxwell's "demon" hypothesis. Two Ag-O-Cs thermal electron ejectors, A and B, are settled in a vacuum tube. A non-uniform magnetic field exerted on the tube provides a one-way channel for the thermal…
Maxwell's Demon, 'a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course', has been the centre of much debate about its abilities to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Landauer's hypothesis, that the…
Recent implementations of Maxwell demons and other devices exhibiting asymmetric response to particles incident from opposite directions have raised conceptual and practical interest. According to quantum-scattering-theory selection rules,…
In the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is a macroscopic physical law that states that in any isolated system, entropy can only increase and order, or organization, can only decrease. This means that in the long run, energy will always…
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…
We study the reduction in total entropy, and associated conversion of environmental heat into work, arising from the coupling and decoupling of two systems followed by processing determined by suitable mutual feedback. The scheme is based…
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…
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that temporal evolution of an isolated system occurs with non-diminishing entropy. In quantum realm, this holds for energy-isolated systems the evolution of which is described by the so-called unital…
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…
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…
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system is non-decreasing. Discussing the Second Law in the quantum world poses new challenges and provides new opportunities, involving fundamental…
The Landauer principle states that decrease in entropy of a system, inevitably leads to a dissipation of heat to the environment. This statement is usually established by considering the system to be in contact with an environment that is…
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…
We study the physical mechanism of Maxwell's Demon (MD) helping to do extra work in thermodynamic cycles, by describing measurement of position, insertion of wall and information erasing of MD in a quantum mechanical fashion. The heat…
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…
An autonomous out of equilibrium Maxwell's demon is used to reverse the natural direction of the heat flux between two electric circuits kept at different temperatures and coupled by the electric thermal noise. The demon does not process…
We present a pedagogical review of the fundamental concepts in thermodynamics of information, by focusing on the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy production. Especially, we discuss the relationship among thermodynamic…
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…
Szilard's one-molecule engine is operated by a Maxwell's demon attempting to convert heat to work. It is argued here that when using the demon to relate information to work (Landauer's principle), the demon's goal must be regarded as an…
The problem of Maxwell's demon in granular gas is revisited in the case of a mixture of two particle species. The phase space is found to be 2d. Existence of cyclic orbits, with periodic segregation, is demonstrated by investigating the…