Related papers: Experimental verification of the work fluctuation-…
The conversion of thermal energy into work is usually more efficient in the slow-driving regime, where the power output is vanishingly small. Efficient work extraction for fast driving protocols remains an outstanding challenge at the…
In Szilard's engine, measurement and feedback allows to extract work from an equilibrium environment, a process otherwise forbidden by the laws of thermodynamics. Recent theoretical developments have established fluctuation theorems and…
The Szilard engine stands as a compelling illustration of the intricate interplay between information and thermodynamics. While at thermodynamic equilibrium, the apparent breach of the second law of thermodynamics was reconciled by Landauer…
We present a critical examination of the difficulties with the quantum versions of a lifted weight that are widely used as work storage systems in quantum thermodynamics. To overcome those difficulties, we turn to the strong connections…
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…
In a classic thought experiment, Szilard suggested a heat engine where a single particle, for example an atom or a molecule, is confined in a container coupled to a single heat bath. The container can be separated into two parts by a…
Information is physical but information is also processed in finite time. Where computing protocols are concerned, finite-time processing in the quantum regime can dynamically generate coherence. Here we show that this can have significant…
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…
Reducing work fluctuation and dissipation in heat engines or, more generally, information heat engines that perform feedback control is vital to maximize their efficiency. The same problem arises when we attempt to maximize the efficiency…
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…
Entanglement in many-body systems may display interesting signatures of quantum phase transitions and similar properties are starting to be encountered in the analysis of work fluctuations. Here, we consider the fermionic…
We study the problem of the energetic cost of information erasure by looking at it through the lens of the Jarzynski equality. We observe that the Landauer bound, $\langle W \rangle \geq kT \ln 2$, on average dissipated work $\langle W…
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…
Landauer's principle states that erasure of each bit of information in a system requires at least a unit of energy $k_B T \ln 2$ to be dissipated. In return, the blank bit may possibly be utilized to extract usable work of the amount $k_B T…
We consider work extraction from $N$ copies of a quantum system. When the same work-extraction process is implemented on each copy, the relative size of fluctuations is expected to decay as $1/\sqrt{N}$. Here, we consider protocols where…
For finite-time quantum Otto heat engine with working fluid consisting of either a (i) qubit or (ii) a harmonic oscillator, we show that the relative fluctuation of output work is always greater than the corresponding relative fluctuation…
In a generalized framework for the Landauer erasure protocol, we study bounds on the heat dissipated in typical nonequilibrium quantum processes. In contrast to thermodynamic processes, quantum fluctuations are not suppressed in the…
In the standard framework of thermodynamics the work produced or consumed in a process is a random variable whose average value is bounded by the change in the free energy of the system. This work is calculated without regard for the size…
Landauer's Principle states that the energy cost of information processing must exceed the product of the temperature and the change in Shannon entropy of the information-bearing degrees of freedom. However, this lower bound is achievable…
We study the performance of a quantum Otto heat engine with two spins coupled by a Heisenberg interaction, taking into account not only the mean values of work and efficiency but also their fluctuations. We first show that, for this system,…