Related papers: How small can Maxwell's demon be? -- Lessons from …
It is generally accepted, following Landauer and Bennett, that the process of measurement involves no minimum entropy cost, but the erasure of information in resetting the memory register of a computer to zero requires dissipating heat into…
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…
Stochastic heat engines are devices that generate work from random thermal motion using a small number of highly fluctuating degrees of freedom. Proposals for such devices have existed for more than a century and include the Maxwell demon…
Previous measurements utilizing Maxwell relations to measure change in entropy, $S$, demonstrated remarkable accuracy of measuring the spin-1/2 entropy of electrons in a weakly coupled quantum dot. However, these previous measurements…
We introduce a protocol to transfer excitations between two noninteracting qubits via purely dissipative processes (i.e., in the Lindblad master equation there is no coherent interaction between the qubits). The fundamental ingredients are…
Thermal contact is the archetype of non-equilibrium processes driven by constant non-equilibrium constraints when the latter are enforced by reservoirs exchanging conserved microscopic quantities. At a mesoscopic scale only the energies of…
We use Monte Carlo and genetic algorithms to train neural-network feedback-control protocols for simulated fluctuating nanosystems. These protocols convert the information obtained by the feedback process into heat or work, allowing the…
The limit of small entropy production is reached in relaxing systems long after preparation, and in stationary driven systems in the limit of small driving power. Surprisingly, for extended systems this limit is not in general the…
The ability to measure the stochastic degrees of freedom of a thermal system enables the extraction of energy from an equilibrium heat bath. This is the underlying principle of Maxwell's demon and subsequent information engines. Here, we…
The possibility of extracting more work from a physical system thanks to the information obtained from measurements has been a topic of fundamental interest in the context of thermodynamics since the formulation of the Maxwell's demon…
Artificial molecular machines are often driven by the periodic variation of an external parameter. This external control exerts work on the system of which a part can be extracted as output if the system runs against an applied load.…
We consider overdamped physical systems evolving under a feedback-controlled fluctuating potential and in contact with a thermal bath at temperature $T$. A Markovian description of the dynamics, which keeps only the last value of the…
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…
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…
Physical systems driven away from equilibrium by an external controller dissipate heat to the environment; the excess entropy production in the thermal reservoir can be interpreted as a "cost" to transform the system in a finite time. The…
In this paper we examine the Maxwell Demon problem from an information theoretic and computational point-of-view. In particular we calculate the required capacity of a communication channel that transports information to and from the Demon.…
We describe a measurement-and-feedback technique to deterministically prepare low-entropy states of atomic spin ensembles. Using quantum non-demolition measurement and incoherent optical feedback, we drive arbitrary states in the…
We extend the theory of stochastic thermodynamics in three directions: (i) instead of a continuously monitored system we consider measurements only at an arbitrary set of discrete times, (ii) we allow for imperfect measurements and…
We report an experimental realisation of Maxwell's demon in a photonic setup. We show that a measurement at the single-photon level followed by a feed-forward operation allows the extraction of work from intense thermal light into an…
In nature stationary nonequilibrium systems cannot exist on their own, rather they need to be driven from outside in order to keep them away from equilibrium. While the internal mean entropy of such stationary systems is constant, the…