Related papers: Szilard Engines as Quantum Thermodynamical Systems
The laws of thermodynamics strongly restrict the performance of thermal machines. Standard thermodynamics, initially developed for uncorrelated macroscopic systems, does not hold for microscopic systems correlated with their environments.…
Thermodynamics is a highly successful macroscopic theory widely used across the natural sciences and for the construction of everyday devices, from car engines and fridges to power plants and solar cells. With thermodynamics predating…
The Landauer principle states that any logically irreversible information processing must be accompanied by dissipation into the environment. In this study, we investigate the heat dissipation associated with finite-time information erasure…
We speculate whether the second law of thermodynamics has more to do with Turing machines than steam pipes. It states the logical reversibility of reality as a computation, i.e., the fact that no information is forgotten: nature computes…
Landauer's erasure principle is a cornerstone of thermodynamics and information theory. According to this principle, erasing information incurs a minimum energy cost. Recently, Vaccaro and Barnett [Proc. R. Soc {\bf 467}, 1770 (2011)]…
The standard relations between information theory and thermodynamics are challenged. The Szilard engine is revisited and the bound proposed by Landauer is replaced by a different one which includes errors in information processing. Instead…
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…
We look at certain thought experiments based upon the 'delayed choice' and 'quantum eraser' interference experiments, which present a complementarity between information gathered from a quantum measurement and interference effects. It has…
Building on parallels between geometric quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, we explore an alternative basis for quantum thermodynamics that exploits the differential geometry of the underlying state space. We develop both…
Szil\'ard's information engine is a canonical example in the field of thermodynamics of information. We realize experimentally a macroscopic many-particle Szil\'ard engine that consists of active particles and use it to lift a mass against…
We present a computational model for Szilard's engine and the information discarding process. Taking advantage of a fact that the one is essentially the reversed cycle of the other, we can discuss the both by employing the same model.…
We study the unitary time evolution of a simple quantum Hamiltonian describing a heat engine coupled to two heat baths. The engine is modeled as a three-level system. Each heat bath consists of a single harmonic oscillator. The engine is…
This work provides an overview of key historical developments in the formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, focusing on the notorious challenge of ``Maxwell's Demon'', a hypothetical creature who could presumably violate that law.…
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…
Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for systems whose dynamics depends on acquired information by measurement. However, when one consider measurement and erasure process together along with the system it saves the second…
Landauer's principle bridges information theory and thermodynamics by linking the entropy change of a system during a process to the average energy dissipated to its environment. Although typically discussed in the context of erasing a…
In recent years we have witnessed a concentrated effort to make sense of thermodynamics for small-scale systems. One of the main difficulties is to capture a suitable notion of work that models realistically the purpose of quantum machines,…
The Landauer principle sets a fundamental thermodynamic constraint on the minimum amount of heat that must be dissipated to erase one logical bit of information through a quasi-statically slow protocol. For finite time information erasure,…
Recent papers discussing thermodynamic processes in strongly coupled quantum systems claim a violation of Landauer's principle and imply a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. If true, this would have powerful consequences.…
Whilst the complexity of acquiring knowledge of a quantum state has been extensively studied in the fields of quantum tomography and quantum learning, a physical understanding of its operational role and cost in quantum thermodynamics is…