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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…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-12-29 Aki Kutvonen , Jonne Koski , Tapio Ala-Nissilä

This letter exposes a tight connection between the thermodynamic efficiency of information processing and predictive inference. A generalized lower bound on dissipation is derived for partially observable information engines which are…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2020-02-12 Susanne Still

The optimal efficiency of quantum (or classical) heat engines whose heat baths are $n$-particle systems is given by the information geometry and the strong large deviation. We give the optimal work extraction process as a concrete…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2017-07-19 Hiroyasu Tajima , Masahito Hayashi

Extending the quantum formulation of [Phys. Rev. X 3, 041003 (2013)] to a more general setting for studying the thermodynamics of information processing including initial correlations, we generalize the second law of thermodynamics to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-13 Shou-I Tang , Emery Doucet , Akram Touil , Sebastian Deffner , Akira Sone

A diffusive process that is reset to its origin at random times, so-called stochastic resetting (SR), is an ubiquitous expedient in many natural systems . Yet, beyond its ability to improve the efficiency of target searching, SR is a true…

According to Landauer's principle, erasure of information is the only part of a computation process that unavoidably involves energy dissipation. If done reversibly, such an erasure generates the minimal heat of $k_BT\ln 2$ per erased bit…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2017-01-20 Dmitri V. Averin , Jukka P. Pekola

The paradox of Maxwell's demon motivated the development of information thermodynamics and the creation of nanoscale information engines. We now understand that machines such as the molecular motors within cells can in principle harvest…

We measured the energy efficiency of information erasure using silicon DRAM cells capable of counting charges on capacitors at the single-electron level. Our measurements revealed that the efficiency decreased as the erasure error…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-04-01 Takase Shimizu , Kensaku Chida , Gento Yamahata , Katsuhiko Nishiguchi

In an asymmetric Szilard engine model of Maxwell's demon, we show the equivalence between information theoretical and thermodynamic entropies when the demon erases information optimally. The work gain by the engine can be exactly canceled…

Classical Physics · Physics 2011-12-13 Akio Hosoya , Koji Maruyama , Yutaka Shikano

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

The Mpemba effect denotes an anomalous relaxation phenomenon where a system initially at a hot temperature cools faster than a system that starts at a less elevated temperature. We introduce an isothermal analog of this effect for a system…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-09-02 Julius Degünther , Udo Seifert

We study an information engine operating in an active bath, where a Brownian particle confined in a harmonic trap undergoes feedback-driven displacement cycles. Unlike thermal environments, active baths exhibit temporally correlated…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-11-27 Sehoon Bahng , Jae Sung Lee , Cheol-Min Ghim

Various exotic phenomena emerge in non-equilibrium quantum many-body systems. The Mpemba effect, denoting the situation where a hot system freezes faster than the colder one, is a counterintuitive non-equilibrium phenomenon that has…

Strongly Correlated Electrons · Physics 2026-03-13 Wei-Xuan Chang , Shuai Yin , Shi-Xin Zhang , Zi-Xiang Li

Optimizing the performance of thermal machines is an essential task of thermodynamics. We here consider the optimization of information engines that convert information about the state of a system into work. We concretely introduce a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-06-28 Paul Fadler , Alexander Friedenberger , Eric Lutz

We identify that quantum coherence is a valuable resource in the quantum heat engine, which is designed in a quantum thermodynamic cycle assisted by a quantum Maxwell's demon. This demon is in a superposed state. The quantum work and heat…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-09-09 Yun-Hao Shi , Hai-Long Shi , Xiao-Hui Wang , Ming-Liang Hu , Si-Yuan Liu , Wen-Li Yang , Heng Fan

To induce transport, detailed balance must be broken. A common mechanism is to bias the dynamics with a thermodynamic fuel, such as chemical energy. An intriguing, alternative strategy is for a Maxwell demon to effect the bias using…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-11 Jordan M. Horowitz , Takahiro Sagawa , Juan M. R. Parrondo

Information can improve heat engine performance, but the underlying principles are still not so clear. Here we introduce a Carnot information machine (CIE) and obtain a quantitative relationship between the engine performance and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-07-21 Yang Xiao , Qian Zeng , Jin Wang

It is demonstrated that Maxwell's demon can be used to allow a machine to extract energy from a heat bath by use of information that is processed by the demon at a remote location. The model proposed here effectively replaces transmission…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-06-06 S. Hossenfelder

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…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2022-11-08 Rafael Sánchez , Peter Samuelsson , Patrick P. Potts

In Szilard's engine, a demon measures a one-particle gas and applies feedback to extract work from thermal fluctuations, embodying Maxwell's notion that information reduces thermodynamic entropy - an apparent second-law violation. The…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-08-26 Xiangjun Xing