Related papers: Capturing the Demon in Szilard's Engine
We introduce a family of Maxwellian Demons for which correlations among information bearing degrees of freedom can be calculated exactly and in compact analytical form. This allows one to precisely determine Demon functional thermodynamic…
Landauer's principle, often regarded as the foundation of the thermodynamics of information processing, holds that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths,…
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…
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…
It is nearly 150 years since Maxwell challenged the validity of the second law of thermodynamics by imagining a tiny creature who could sort the molecules of a gas in such a way that would decrease entropy without exerting any work. The…
We investigate thermodynamics of feedback processes driven by measurement. Regarding system and memory device as a composite system, mutual information as a measure of correlation between the two constituents contributes to the entropy of…
In apparent contradiction to the laws of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon is able to cyclically extract work from a system in contact with a thermal bath exploiting the information about its microstate. The resolution of this paradox…
The Szil\'ard engine is a mechanism (akin to Maxwell's demon) for converting information into energy, which seemingly violates the second law of thermodynamics. Originally a classical thought experiment, it was extended to a quantized…
We propose a setup based on two coupled quantum dots where thermodynamics of a measurement can be quantitatively characterized. The information obtained in the measurement can be utilized by performing feedback in a manner apparently…
We study a quantum Szilard engine that is not powered by heat drawn from a thermal reservoir, but rather by projective measurements. The engine is constituted of a system $\mathcal{S}$, a weight $\mathcal{W}$, and a Maxwell demon…
Landauer argued that the process of erasing the information stored in a memory device incurs an energy cost in the form of a minimum amount of mechanical work. We find, however, that this energy cost can be reduced to zero by paying a cost…
In any general cycle of measurement, feedback and erasure, the measurement will reduce the entropy of the system when information about the state is obtained, while erasure, according to Landauer's principle, is accompanied by a…
The Landauer principle establishes a fundamental lower bound on the energetic cost of the erasure of a one-bit memory in thermal equilibrium. Here, we experimentally demonstrate how this bound can be effectively circumvented by introducing…
We show that any external intervention (insertion or removal of a partition) that destroys the equilibrium or brings it in a system always requires work and heat to ensure that the first law is obeyed, a fact that has been completely…
We analyze a quantum Maxwell demon operating a Szilard engine in free fall near a black hole horizon, where quantum information, thermodynamics, and spacetime causality intersect. The demon is modeled as a coherent two-level system, and the…
Maxwell's demon is a special case of a feedback controlled system, where information gathered by measurement is utilized by driving a system along a thermodynamic process that depends on the measurement outcome. The demon illustrates that…
The common saying, that information is power, takes a rigorous form in stochastic thermodynamics, where a quantitative equivalence between the two helps explain the paradox of Maxwell's demon in its ability to reduce entropy. In the present…
We present a pedagogical review of the fundamental concepts in thermodynamics of information, by focusing on the second law of thermodynamics and the entropy production. Especially, we discuss the relationship among thermodynamic…
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…
The Landauer principle states that decrease in entropy of a system, inevitably leads to a dissipation of heat to the environment. This statement is usually established by considering the system to be in contact with an environment that is…