Related papers: Maxwell's Conjecture of the Demon creating a Tempe…
Recently Sagawa and Ueda [Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 080403 (2008)] derived a bound on the work that can be extracted from a quantum system with the use of feedback control. They left open the question of whether this bound could be achieved for…
Maxwell's demon was born in 1867 and still thrives in modern physics. He plays important roles in clarifying the connections between two theories: thermodynamics and information. Here, we present the history of the demon and a variety of…
In the past decade several theoretical Maxwell's demon models have been proposed exhibiting effects such as refrigerating, doing work at the cost of information, and some experiments have been done to realise these effects. Here we propose…
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…
In the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is a macroscopic physical law that states that in any isolated system, entropy can only increase and order, or organization, can only decrease. This means that in the long run, energy will always…
We study the reduction in total entropy, and associated conversion of environmental heat into work, arising from the coupling and decoupling of two systems followed by processing determined by suitable mutual feedback. The scheme is based…
An equation of state for an ideal gas with a small number of particles is studied. The resulting equation is found to differ from that expected in conventional thermodynamics, which is strikingly illustrated when considering the traditional…
Maxwells Demon is a mythical being, first described by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell (although named Maxwells Demon by Lord Kelvin). Maxwell used it in a thought experiment to potentially violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics by…
Starting from 2002, at least two kinds of laboratory-testable, solid-state Maxwell demons have been proposed that utilize the electric field energy of an open-gap n-p junction and that seem to challenge the validity of the Second Law of…
This is a review of the theory of quantum thermodynamic demons; these are quantum systems that look like they violate the laws of thermodynamics, in analogy with Maxwell's demon. It concentrates on autonomous demons that can be made using…
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…
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…
A tantalizing version of Maxwell's demon is presented which appears to operate reversibly. A container of hard core disks is separated into two chambers of equal volume by a membrane that selects which disk can penetrate depending on the…
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…
We have simulated numerically an automated version of Maxwell's demon inspired by Smoluchowski's ideas of 1912. Two gas chambers of equal volume are connected via an opening that is covered by a trapdoor. The trapdoor can open to the left…
In scenarios coined Maxwell's demon, information on microscopic degrees of freedom is used to seemingly violate the second law of thermodynamics. This has been studied in the classical as well as the quantum domain. In this paper, we study…
We report two results complementing the second law of thermodynamics for Markovian open quantum systems coupled to multiple reservoirs with different temperatures and chemical potentials. First, we derive a nonequilibrium free energy…
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that temporal evolution of an isolated system occurs with non-diminishing entropy. In quantum realm, this holds for energy-isolated systems the evolution of which is described by the so-called unital…
The performance of equilibrium sensors is restricted by the laws of equilibrium thermodynamics. We here investigate the physical limits on nonequilibrium sensing in bipartite systems with nonreciprocal coupling. We show that one of the…
Even though the second law of thermodynamics holds the supreme position among the laws of nature, as stated by many distinguished scientists, notably Eddington and Einstein, its position appears to be also quite peculiar. Given the atomic…