Related papers: Capturing the Demon in Szilard's Engine
We study the physical mechanism of Maxwell's Demon (MD) helping to do extra work in thermodynamic cycles, by describing measurement of position, insertion of wall and information erasing of MD in a quantum mechanical fashion. The heat…
Maxwell's Demon, 'a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course', has been the centre of much debate about its abilities to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Landauer's hypothesis, that the…
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…
As early as 1867, two years after the introduction of the concept of entropy by Clausius, Maxwell showed that the limitations imposed by the second law of thermodynamics depend on the information that one possesses about the state of a…
Following recent work by Marathe and Parrondo [PRL, 104, 245704 (2010)], we construct a classical Hamiltonian system whose energy is reduced during the adiabatic cycling of external parameters, when initial conditions are sampled…
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…
The so-called information-thermodynamics link has been created in a series of works starting from Maxwell demon and established by the idea of transforming information into work in the though experiment of Szilard which then evolved into…
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…
With the increasing interest for the control of the system at the nano and mesoscopic scales, studies have been focused on the limit of the energy dissipation in an open system by refining the concept of the Maxwell's demon. The well-known…
Adiabatic measurements, followed by feedback and erasure protocols, have often been considered as a model to embody Maxwell's Demon paradox and to study the interplay between thermodynamics and information processing. Such studies have led…
In the present paper, several issues concerning the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell's demon and Landauer's principle are dealt with. I argue that if the demon and the system on which it operates without dissipation of external energy…
We review theory of information thermodynamics which incorporates effects of measurement and feedback into nonequilibrium thermodynamics of a small system, and discuss how the second law of thermodynamics should be extended for such…
We propose and analyze a quantum version of Szilard's ``one-molecule engine.'' In particular, we recover, in the quantum context, Szilard's conclusion concerning the free energy ``cost'' of measurements: $\Delta F \geq k_B T\ln2$ per bit of…
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…
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…
Classical and quantum error correction are presented in the form of Maxwell's demon and their efficiency analyzed from the thermodynamic point of view. We explain how Landauer's principle of information erasure applies to both cases. By…
A Szilard Engine is a hypothetical device which is able to extract work from a single thermal reservoir by measuring the position of particles within the engine. We derive the amount of work that can be extracted from such a device in the…
Information engines model ``Maxwell's demon" mechanistically. However, the demon's strategy is pre-described by an external experimenter, and information engines are conveniently designed such that observables contain complete information…
Time-dependent protocols that perform irreversible logical operations, such as memory erasure, cost work and produce heat, placing bounds on the efficiency of computers. Here we use a prototypical computer model of a physical memory to show…
In this theoretical study, we determine the maximum amount of work extractable in finite time by a demon performing continuous measurements on a quadratic Hamiltonian system subjected to thermal fluctuations, in terms of the information…