Related papers: The Harmonic Quantum Szil\'ard Engine
The long-standing paradigm of Maxwell's demon is till nowadays a frequently investigated issue, which still provides interesting insights into basic physical questions. Considering a single-electron transistor, where we implement a Maxwell…
We describe a minimal model of a quantum Maxwell demon obeying Hamiltonian dynamics. The model is solved exactly, and we analyze its steady-state behavior. We find that writing information to a quantum memory induces a probability current…
Quantum error correction (QEC) is a procedure by which the quantum state of a system is protected against a known type of noise, by preemptively adding redundancy to that state. Such a procedure is commonly used in quantum computing when…
We discuss the possibility of extraction of energy from a single heat bath in a cyclic process, under some special initial conditions. We give an explicit example in which a system initially prepared in a microcanonical ensemble, is able to…
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…
Subsystems of a composite system in a pure state generally exist in mixed states and undergo changes with the overall state. This phenomenon arises from the coherence of the entire system and represents a crucial distinction between quantum…
Information engines, sometimes referred to as Maxwell Demon engines, utilize information obtained through measurement to control the conversion of energy into useful work. Discussions around such devices often assume the measurement step to…
We studied the efficiency of two different schemes for a quantum heat engine, by considering a single Dirac particle trapped in an infinite one-dimensional potential well as the "working substance." The first scheme is a cycle, composed of…
Quantum measurement of a system can change its mean energy, as well as entropy. A selective measurement (classical or quantum) can be used as a "Maxwell's demon" to power a single-temperature heat engine, by decreasing the entropy. Quantum…
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…
Quantum coherence provides a controllable thermodynamic resource that can raise or lower the effective temperature of a cavity mode, enabling efficiency tuning in quantum heat engines. Here, we derive analytic expressions for the effective…
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…
Quantum thermal machines are powerful platforms for investigating how quantum effects impact the energy flow between different systems. Here, we investigate a two-stroke cycle in which spin-squeezing effects are intrinsically switched on…
Heat engines convert thermal energy into mechanical work. We here report the experimental realization of a fully quantum engine that converts quantum coherence into work. A single solid-state spin in diamond is fueled by a coherent bath and…
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…
In a recent paper [Vaikuntanathan and Jarzynski, Phys. Rev. E {\bf 83}, 061120 (2011), arXiv:1105.1744] a model was introduced whereby work could be extracted from a thermal bath by measuring the energy of a particle that was thermalized by…
We review recent studies of a colloidal information engine that consists of a bead in water and held by an optical trap. The bead is ratcheted upward without any apparent external work, by taking advantage of favorable thermal fluctuations.…
Energy extraction from a measured quantum system is a cornerstone of information thermodynamics as illustrated by Maxwell's demon. The nonequilibrium physics of many-particle systems is additionally strongly influenced by quantum…
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.…
A Maxwell's demon type ``information engine" which extracts work from a bath is constructed from a microscopic Hamiltonian for the whole system including a subsystem, a thermal bath, and a nonequilibrium bath of phonons or photons which…