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Related papers: Maxwell's Demon

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Szilard's one-molecule engine is operated by a Maxwell's demon attempting to convert heat to work. It is argued here that when using the demon to relate information to work (Landauer's principle), the demon's goal must be regarded as an…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2015-04-29 J. H. van Hateren

We present an autonomous Maxwell's demon scheme. It is first analysed theoretically in term of information exchange in a closed system and then implemented experimentally with a single Rydberg atom and a high-quality microwave resonator.…

Maxwell demons are creatures that are imagined to be able to reduce the entropy of a system without performing any work on it. Conventionally, such a Maxwell demon's intricate action consists of measuring individual particles and…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2019-12-09 Rafael Sánchez , Janine Splettstoesser , Robert S. Whitney

Mechanical Maxwell's demons, such as Smoluchowski's trapdoor and Feynman's ratchet and pawl need external energy source to operate. If you cease to feed a demon the Second Law of thermodynamics will quickly stop its operation. Nevertheless,…

Classical Physics · Physics 2008-11-26 Z. K. Silagadze

The birth, life, and death of Maxwell's demon provoked a profound discussion about the interplay between thermodynamics, computation, and information. Even after its exorcism, the demon continues to inspire a multidisciplinary field. This…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-13 A. de Oliveira Junior , Jonatan Bohr Brask , Rafael Chaves

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-08-05 Kurt Jacobs

We introduce a Maxwell demon which generates many-body entanglement robustly against bit-flip noises, which allows us to obtain quantum advantage. Adopting the protocol of the voter model used for opinion dynamics approaching consensus, the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-04-13 Sungguen Ryu , Rosa López , Raúl Toral

Converting information into work has during the last decade gained renewed interest as it gives insight into the relation between information theory and thermodynamics. Here we theoretically investigate an implementation of Maxwell's demon…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2020-04-09 Björn Annby-Andersson , Peter Samuelsson , Ville F. Maisi , Patrick P. Potts

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…

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-10-31 V. Vedral

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…

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…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2023-04-07 Robert S. Whitney

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…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-12-20 Takahiro Sagawa

We propose a new way of looking at the quantum Maxwell's demon problem in terms of conditional action. A "conditional action" on a system is a unitary time evolution, selected according to the result of a previous measurement, which can…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-10-28 Heinz-Jürgen Schmidt

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…

Classical Physics · Physics 2013-04-17 Germano D'Abramo

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-18 Sayan Mondal , Aparajita Bhattacharyya , Ahana Ghoshal , Ujjwal Sen

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…

Motivated by recent progress on the motive power of information in quantum thermodynamics, we put forth an operational resource theory of Maxwell's demons. We show that the resourceful ({\em daemonic}) states can be partitioned into at most…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-06-25 Gabriel T. Landi , Giacomo Guarnieri , Benjamin Morris , John Goold , Gerardo Adesso

Maxwell's Demon is at the heart of the interrelation between quantum information processing and thermodynamics. In this thought experiment, a demon generates a temperature gradient between two thermal baths initially at equilibrium by…

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…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2026-05-12 Hamed Hadi , Amin Rezaei Akbarieh , Goksel Daylan Esmer