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Related papers: Maxwell's Demon and its Fallacies Demystified

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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 provide a unified thermodynamic formalism describing information transfers in autonomous as well as nonautonomous systems described by stochastic thermodynamics. We demonstrate how information is continuously generated in an auxiliary…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2014-08-06 Jordan M. Horowitz , Massimiliano Esposito

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

A previously published model of the isothermal Maxwell demon as one of models of open quantum systems endowed with faculty of selforganization is reconstructed here. It describes an open quantum system interacting with a single…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-10-31 V. Capek , J. Bok

This chapter provides an overview of the methods and results for quantum thermodynamic experiments with single-electron devices. The experiments with a single-electron box on Jarzynski equality and Crooks relation, two-temperature…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2019-05-01 Jonne V. Koski , Jukka P. Pekola

We consider an autonomous implementation of Maxwell's demon in a quantum dot architecture. As in the original thought experiment, only the second law of thermodynamics is seemingly violated when disregarding the demon. The autonomous…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2022-11-08 Rafael Sánchez , Peter Samuelsson , Patrick P. Potts

Maxwell refrigerator as a device that can transfer heat from a cold to hot temperature reservoir making use of information reservoir was introduced by Mandal et al. \cite{Mandal2013a}. The model has a two state demon and a bit stream…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-02-24 Toby Joseph , Kiran V

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

A quantum Maxwell demon is a device that can lower the entropy of a quantum system by providing it with purity. The functionality of such a quantum demon is rooted in a quantum mechanical SWAP operation exchanging mixed and pure states. We…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-12-20 A. V. Lebedev , G. B. Lesovik , V. M. Vinokur , G. Blatter

We show that in mesoscopic four-terminal thermoelectric devices with two electrodes (the source and the drain) and two heat baths, inelastic scattering processes can lead to unconventional thermoelectric transport. The source (or the drain)…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2021-02-24 Jian-Hua Jiang , Jincheng Lu , Yoseph Imry

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…

Classical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Roger D. Jones , Sven G. Redsun , Roger E. Frye

The common saying, that information is power, takes a rigorous form in stochastic thermodynamics, where a quantitative equivalence between the two helps explain the paradox of Maxwell's demon in its ability to reduce entropy. In the present…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-03-09 Amirhossein Taghvaei , Olga Movilla Miangolarra , Rui Fu , Yongxin Chen , Tryphon T. Georgiou

We show that Maxwell's demon-like nonreciprocity can be supported in a class of non-Hermitian gyrotropic metasurfaces in the linear regime. The proposed metasurface functions as a transmission-only Maxwell's demon operating at a pair of…

Applied Physics · Physics 2021-04-28 Wenyan Wang , Wang Tat Yau , Yanxia Cui , Jin Wang , Kin Hung Fung

We study the stochastic dynamics of Brownian particles in a heat bath and subject to an active feedback control by an external, Maxwell's demon-like agent. The agent uses the information of the velocity of a particle and reduces its thermal…

Classical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Kyung Hyuk Kim , Hong Qian

We propose a way to incorporate the effect of a specific class of feedback processes into stochastic thermodynamics. These "Maxwell demon" feedbacks do not affect the system energetics but only the energy barriers between the system states…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2012-08-27 Massimiliano Esposito , Gernot Schaller

Thermodynamic cycles are idealized processes that can convert heat into work or produce heat flow against a temperature gradient with the input of work. They remain an active area of research in modern stochastic thermodynamics. In…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-02-12 S. Liu , A. Datta , A. C. Barato

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…

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

I study an autonomous quantum Maxwell's demon based on two exchange-coupled quantum dots attached to the spin-polarized leads. The principle of operation of the demon is based on the coherent oscillations between the spin states of the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-01-24 Krzysztof Ptaszynski

In the last twenty years there has been significant progress in our understanding of quantum transport far from equilibrium and a conceptual framework has emerged through a combination of the Landauer approach with the non-equilibrium Green…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2008-03-01 Supriyo Datta