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Landauer's principle, often regarded as the foundation of the thermodynamics of information processing, holds that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths,…

Classical Physics · Physics 2011-01-11 Charles H. Bennett

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…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2015-04-29 J. H. van Hateren

Key to biological success, the requisite variety that confronts an adaptive organism is the set of detectable, accessible, and controllable states in its environment. We analyze its role in the thermodynamic functioning of information…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-04-26 Alexander B. Boyd , Dibyendu Mandal , James P. Crutchfield

While most of the existing quantum information engines assisted by Maxwell's demon harness thermal fluctuations, those that rectify only quantum fluctuations have recently been constructed. We propose an alternative type of quantum…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-02-24 Kangqiao Liu , Masaya Nakagawa , Masahito Ueda

It is demonstrated that Maxwell's demon can be used to allow a machine to extract energy from a heat bath by use of information that is processed by the demon at a remote location. The model proposed here effectively replaces transmission…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-06-06 S. Hossenfelder

The remarkable progress of artificial intelligence (AI) has revealed the enormous energy demands of modern digital architectures, raising deep concerns about sustainability. In stark contrast, the human brain operates efficiently on only…

Biological Physics · Physics 2025-11-03 Toshio Yanagida , Keisuke Fujita , Mitsuhiro Iwaki

An essential role of information in microscopic thermodynamics (e.g. Maxwell's demon) opens a challenging question if there exists a formulation of the second law of thermodynamics based only on pure information ideas. Here, such a…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-04-29 Miroslav Holeček

Energy extraction from a measured quantum system is a cornerstone of information thermodynamics as illustrated by Maxwell's demon. The nonequilibrium physics of many-particle systems is additionally strongly influenced by quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-12-05 Josef Hloušek , Tobias Denzler , Vojtěch Švarc , Miroslav Ježek , Eric Lutz , Radim Filip

We suggest that a single-electron transistor continuously monitored by a quantum point contact may function as a Maxwell demon when closed-loop feedback operations are applied as time-dependent modifications of the tunneling rates across…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2011-08-25 Gernot Schaller , Clive Emary , Gerold Kiesslich , Tobias Brandes

In introductory biology, aging is typically explained as a result of mutations during the DNA replication process within cells. Upon abstraction, we recognize that cellular aging can be understood as the gradual decay in fidelity of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-05-25 Maggie Williams , Emery Doucet , Sebastian Deffner

The emerging field of quantum thermodynamics is beginning to reveal the intriguing role that information can play in quantum thermal engines. Information enters as a resource when considering feedback-controlled thermal machines. While both…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-13 Lindsay Bassman Oftelie , Michele Campisi

The deep connection between thermodynamics, computation, and information is now well established both theoretically and experimentally. Here, we extend these ideas to show that thermodynamics also places fundamental constraints on…

Biological Physics · Physics 2014-10-08 Alex H. Lang , Charles K. Fisher , Thierry Mora , Pankaj Mehta

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-08-05 Kurt Jacobs

A central result that arose in applying information theory to the stochastic thermodynamics of nonlinear dynamical systems is the Information-Processing Second Law (IPSL): the physical entropy of the universe can decrease if compensated by…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-06-07 Alexander B. Boyd , Dibyendu Mandal , Paul M. Riechers , James P. Crutchfield

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…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2019-12-09 Rafael Sánchez , Janine Splettstoesser , Robert S. Whitney

We expand the standard thermodynamic framework of a system coupled to a thermal reservoir by considering a stream of independently prepared units repeatedly put into contact with the system. These units can be in any nonequilibrium state…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2017-04-12 Philipp Strasberg , Gernot Schaller , Tobias Brandes , Massimiliano Esposito

Recently, in a letter to Nature, del Rio et al.8 exploited the quantum viewpoint of the old but well-known thought experiment of Maxwell's demon, a tiny "man-machine" that processes only a single unit of information. In their work, they…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-01-21 Alexandre de Castro

We introduce a family of Maxwellian Demons for which correlations among information bearing degrees of freedom can be calculated exactly and in compact analytical form. This allows one to precisely determine Demon functional thermodynamic…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-03-23 A. B. Boyd , D. Mandal , J. P. Crutchfield

Cells must continuously sense and respond to time-varying environmental stimuli. These signals are transmitted and processed by biochemical signalling networks. However, the biochemical reactions making up these networks are intrinsically…

Molecular Networks · Quantitative Biology 2015-05-18 Filipe Tostevin , Pieter Rein ten Wolde

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…