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Resolution of the century-long paradox on Maxwell's demon reveals a deep connection between information theory and thermodynamics. Although initially introduced as a thought experiment, Maxwell's demon can now be implemented in several…

In this paper two connected Szilard single molecule engines (with different temperature) model of Maxwell's demon are used to demonstrate and analysis the logical compare operation. The logical and physical complexity of compare operations…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2014-08-06 Feng Pan , Heng-Liang Zhang , Jie Qi

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…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2012-02-07 Takahiro Sagawa , Masahito Ueda

I dispute the conventional claim that the second law of thermodynamics is saved from a "Maxwell's Demon" by the entropy cost of information erasure, and show that instead it is measurement that incurs the entropy cost. Thus Brillouin, who…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-22 R. E. Kastner

In many real-world situations, there are constraints on the ways in which a physical system can be manipulated. We investigate the entropy production (EP) and extractable work involved in bringing a system from some initial distribution $p$…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-11-22 Artemy Kolchinsky , David H. Wolpert

With the increasing interest for the control of the system at the nano and mesoscopic scales, studies have been focused on the limit of the energy dissipation in an open system by refining the concept of the Maxwell's demon. The well-known…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2020-08-26 Qian Zeng , Jin Wang

We propose a new thermodynamic equality and several inequalities concerning the relationship between work and information for an isothermal process with Maxwell's demon. Our approach is based on the formulation a la Jarzynski of the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Takahiro Sagawa , Masahito Ueda

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 study an autonomous model of a Maxwell demon that works by rectifying thermal fluctuations of chemical reactions. It constitutes the chemical analog of a recently studied electronic demon. We characterize its scaling behavior in the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-11-29 Massimo Bilancioni , Massimiliano Esposito , Nahuel Freitas

Maxwell's Demon is at the heart of the interrelation between quantum information processing and thermodynamics. In this thought experiment, a demon generates a temperature gradient between two thermal baths initially at equilibrium by…

The ability to measure the stochastic degrees of freedom of a thermal system enables the extraction of energy from an equilibrium heat bath. This is the underlying principle of Maxwell's demon and subsequent information engines. Here, we…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-12-02 Rémi Goerlich , Gilad Pollack , Eli Flaxer , Saar Rahav , Yael Roichman

The Szil\'ard engine is a mechanism (akin to Maxwell's demon) for converting information into energy, which seemingly violates the second law of thermodynamics. Originally a classical thought experiment, it was extended to a quantized…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-08-29 Paul Davies , Logan Thomas , George Zahariade

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

The nanoscopic isothermal machines are not only energy but also information transducers. We show that the generalized fluctuation theorem with information creation and entropy reduction can be fulfilled for the enzymatic molecular machines…

Biological Physics · Physics 2017-02-06 Michal Kurzynski , Przemyslaw Chelminiak

As early as 1867, two years after the introduction of the concept of entropy by Clausius, Maxwell showed that the limitations imposed by the second law of thermodynamics depend on the information that one possesses about the state of a…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-06-23 Juan M. R. Parrondo

Although there is not a complete "proof" of the second law of thermo- dynamics based on microscopic dynamics, two properties of Hamiltonian systems have been used to prove the impossibility of work extraction from a single thermal…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-04-22 Juan M. R. Parrondo , Léo Granger

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-18 Sayan Mondal , Aparajita Bhattacharyya , Ahana Ghoshal , Ujjwal Sen

We propose and analyze Maxwell's demon based on a single qubit with avoided level crossing. Its operation cycle consists of adiabatic drive to the point of minimum energy separation, measurement of the qubit state, and conditional feedback.…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-01-20 J. P. Pekola , D. S. Golubev , D. V. Averin

The Szilard engine (SZE) is the quintessence of Maxwell's demon, which can extract the work from a heat bath by utilizing information. We present the first complete quantum analysis of the SZE, and derive an analytic expression of the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2011-02-23 Sang Wook Kim , Takahiro Sagawa , Simone De Liberato , Masahito Ueda

Motivated by the recent work by Mandal and Jarzynski on autonomous Maxwell demon information engine, we have extended their model by introducing two different heat baths. The system (demon) is coupled to a memory register (tape) and a work…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-11-23 Shubhashis Rana , A. M. Jayannavar