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Maxwell's demon is a famous thought experiment and a paradigm of the thermodynamics of information. It is related to Szilard's engine, a two-state information-to-work conversion device in which the demon performs single measurements and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-05-11 Paul Raux , Felix Ritort

Free energy fixes the maximum work of a thermodynamic process once the state and Hamiltonian are specified. A work-extraction task asks a different question: how much average work can a single device realize across several preparations and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-06 Sumit Rout , Aravinth Balaji Ravichandran , Paweł Horodecki , Anubhav Chaturvedi

In thermodynamics, an agent's ability to extract work is fundamentally constrained by their environment. Traditional frameworks struggle to capture how strategic decision-making under uncertainty, particularly an agent's tolerance for risk,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-24 Maite Arcos , Philippe Faist , Takahiro Sagawa , Jonathan Oppenheim

Thermodynamics is traditionally concerned with systems comprised of a large number of particles. Here we present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2014-09-29 Paul Skrzypczyk , Anthony J. Short , Sandu Popescu

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-03-09 Lokesh Muruga , Felix Ginot , Sarah A. M. Loos , Clemens Bechinger

We identify generic protocols achieving optimal power extraction from a single active particle subject to continuous feedback control under the assumption that its spatial trajectory, but not its instantaneous self-propulsion force, is…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-11-08 Luca Cocconi , Jacob Knight , Connor Roberts

We introduce a family of Generalized Continuous Maxwell Demons (GCMDs) operating on idealized single-bit equilibrium devices that combine the single-measurement Szilard and the repeated measurements of the Continuous Maxwell Demon…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-03-22 Juan P. Garrahan , Felix Ritort

Following the rising interest in quantum information science, the extension of a heat engine to the quantum regime by exploring microscopic quantum systems has seen a boom of interest in the last decade. Although quantum coherence in the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-03-14 Wentao Ji , Zihua Chai , Mengqi Wang , Yuhang Guo , Xing Rong , Fazhan Shi , Changliang Ren , Ya Wang , Jiangfeng Du

Physical systems are often simulated using a stochastic computation where different final states result from identical initial states. Here, we derive the minimum energy cost of simulating a complex data set of a general physical system…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-05-30 Karoline Wiesner , Mile Gu , Elisabeth Rieper , Vlatko Vedral

In Szilard's engine, a demon measures a one-particle gas and applies feedback to extract work from thermal fluctuations, embodying Maxwell's notion that information reduces thermodynamic entropy - an apparent second-law violation. The…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-08-26 Xiangjun Xing

We consider the task of extracting work from quantum systems in the resource theory perspective of thermodynamics, where free states are arbitrary thermal states, and allowed operations are energy conserving unitary transformations. Taking…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2013-02-13 Paul Skrzypczyk , Anthony J. Short , Sandu Popescu

The amount of extractable work from a physical system is fundamentally connected to the information available about its state, as illustrated by Maxwell's demon and the Gibbs paradox. In standard thermodynamic protocols involving…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-02-27 Tanmoy Biswas

Landauer's principle states that erasure of each bit of information in a system requires at least a unit of energy $k_B T \ln 2$ to be dissipated. In return, the blank bit may possibly be utilized to extract usable work of the amount $k_B T…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2018-06-20 A. Mert Bozkurt , Baris Pekerten , Inanc Adagideli

The so-called information-thermodynamics link created by a thought experiment of Szilard became a core of the modern orthodoxy in the field of quantum information and resources theory in quantum thermodynamics. We remind existing objections…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-05-28 Robert Alicki , Michal Horodecki

We develop a framework based on the Kirkwood-Dirac quasiprobability distribution to quantify the contribution of coherence to work extraction during generic, cyclic quantum evolutions. In particular, we focus on ``anomalous processes'',…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-21 Francesco Perciavalle , Nicola Lo Gullo , Francesco Plastina

We investigate the work dissipated during the irreversible unfolding of single molecules by mechanical force, using the simplest model necessary to represent experimental data. The model consists of two levels (folded and unfolded states)…

Biological Physics · Physics 2012-08-27 F. Ritort , C. Bustamante , I. Tinoco,

We consider a Szilard engine in one dimension, consisting of a single particle of mass $m$, moving between a piston of mass $M$, and a heat reservoir at temperature $T$. In addition to an external force, the piston experiences repeated…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2019-08-01 Deepak Bhat , Abhishek Dhar , Anupam Kundu , Sanjib Sabhapandit

I discuss Haldane's concept of generalised exclusion statistics (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 67}, 937, 1991) and I show that it leads to inconsistencies in the calculation of the particle distribution that maximizes the partition function. These…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2011-11-10 Dragoş-Victor Anghel

The partition function is an essential quantity in statistical mechanics, and its accurate computation is a key component of any statistical analysis of quantum system and phenomenon. However, for interacting many-body quantum systems, its…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-11-16 Yusen Wu , Jingbo Wang

We generalize the second law of thermodynamics in its maximum work formulation for a nonequilibrium initial distribution. It is found that in an isothermal process, the Boltzmann relative entropy (H-function) is not just a Lyapunov function…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-05-13 H. -H. Hasegawa , J. Ishikawa , K. Takara , D. J. Driebe