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A 1929 Gedankenexperiment proposed by Szil\'ard, often referred to as "Szil\'ard's engine", has served as a foundation for computing fundamental thermodynamic bounds to information processing. While Szil\'ard's original box could be…

We present a complete-quantum description of multi-particle Szilard engine which consists of a working substance and a Maxwell's demon. The demon is modeled as a multi-level quantum system with specific quantum control and the working…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2012-03-20 C. Y. Cai , H. Dong , C. P. Sun

Szilard's now-famous single-molecule engine was only the first of three constructions he introduced in 1929 to resolve several paradoxes arising from Maxwell's demon. We analyze Szilard's remaining two demon models. We show that the second…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2020-03-24 Kyle J. Ray , James P. Crutchfield

We investigate the extraction of thermodynamic work by a Maxwell's demon in a multipartite quantum correlated system. We begin by adopting the standard model of a Maxwell's demon as a Turing machine, either in a classical or quantum setup…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2014-12-10 Helena C. Braga , Clodoaldo C. Rulli , Thiago R. de Oliveira , Marcelo S. Sarandy

It is nearly 150 years since Maxwell challenged the validity of the second law of thermodynamics by imagining a tiny creature who could sort the molecules of a gas in such a way that would decrease entropy without exerting any work. The…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-08-24 Ian J. Ford

The gedanken experiment of Maxwell's demon has led to the studies concerning the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The demon measures fluctuations of a system's observable and converts the information gain into work…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-05-09 Y. Masuyama , K. Funo , Y. Murashita , A. Noguchi , S. Kono , Y. Tabuchi , R. Yamazaki , M. Ueda , Y. Nakamura

The second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic in nature. Its formulation requires that the state of a system be described by a probability distribution. A natural question, thereby, arises as to whether a prior knowledge about the state…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2019-04-11 P. S. Pal , A. M. Jayannavar

A CMOS-based implementation of an autonomous Maxwell's demon was recently proposed (Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 120602) to demonstrate that a Maxwell demon can still work at macroscopic scales, provided that its power supply is scaled…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-02-08 Nahuel Freitas , Massimiliano Esposito

We describe a minimal model of an autonomous Maxwell demon, a device that delivers work by rectifying thermal fluctuations while simultaneously writing information to a memory register. We solve exactly for the steady-state behavior of our…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2012-08-10 Dibyendu Mandal , Christopher Jarzynski

The out of equilibrium nature of active systems can be exploited for the design of information-based engines. We design two types of an active Szilard engine that use a Maxwell daemon to extract work from an active bath composed of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-12-07 P. Malgaretti , H. Stark

We propose a finite-time quantum Szilard engine (QSE) with a quantum particle with spin as the working substance (WS) to accelerate the operation of information engines. We introduce a Maxwell's demon (MD) to probe the spin state within a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-19 Tan-Ji Zhou , Yu-Han Ma , C. P. Sun

We propose a new way of looking at the quantum Maxwell's demon problem in terms of conditional action. A "conditional action" on a system is a unitary time evolution, selected according to the result of a previous measurement, which can…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-10-28 Heinz-Jürgen Schmidt

We introduce a Maxwell demon which generates many-body entanglement robustly against bit-flip noises, which allows us to obtain quantum advantage. Adopting the protocol of the voter model used for opinion dynamics approaching consensus, the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-04-13 Sungguen Ryu , Rosa López , Raúl Toral

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

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…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2017-01-20 Dmitri V. Averin , Jukka P. Pekola

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

Information engines model ``Maxwell's demon" mechanistically. However, the demon's strategy is pre-described by an external experimenter, and information engines are conveniently designed such that observables contain complete information…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-07-15 Dorian Daimer , Susanne Still

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…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-12-29 Aki Kutvonen , Jonne Koski , Tapio Ala-Nissilä

Converting information into work has during the last decade gained renewed interest as it gives insight into the relation between information theory and thermodynamics. Here we theoretically investigate an implementation of Maxwell's demon…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2020-04-09 Björn Annby-Andersson , Peter Samuelsson , Ville F. Maisi , Patrick P. Potts

Isothermal information engines operate by extracting net work from a single heat bath through measurement and feedback control. In this work, we analyze a realistic active Szilard engine operating on a single active particle by means of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-05-15 Luca Cocconi , Paolo Malgaretti , Holger Stark