Related papers: Maxwell's Demon, Szilard's Engine and Quantum Meas…
The essence of both classical and quantum engines is to extract useful energy (work) from stochastic energy sources, e.g. thermal baths. In Maxwell's demon engines, work extraction is assisted by a feedback control based on measurements…
Quantum operations provide a general description of the state changes allowed by quantum mechanics. The reversal of quantum operations is important for quantum error-correcting codes, teleportation, and reversing quantum measurements. We…
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…
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…
Szil\'ard's information engine is a canonical example in the field of thermodynamics of information. We realize experimentally a macroscopic many-particle Szil\'ard engine that consists of active particles and use it to lift a mass against…
By considering level shifting during the insertion process we revisit the quantum Szilard engine (QSZE) with fully quantum consideration. We derive the general expressions of the heat absorbed from thermal bath and the total work done to…
In Szilard's engine, measurement and feedback allows to extract work from an equilibrium environment, a process otherwise forbidden by the laws of thermodynamics. Recent theoretical developments have established fluctuation theorems and…
We introduce an information heat engine that is autonomous (i.e., without any time-dependent parameter) but has separated measurement and feedback processes. This model serves as a bridge between the other types of information heat engines…
I dispute the conventional claim that the second law of thermodynamics is saved from a "Maxwell's Demon" by the entropy cost of information erasure, and show that instead it is measurement that incurs the entropy cost. Thus Brillouin, who…
The relation between entropy and information dates back to the classical Maxwell demon (MD) paradox, a thought experiment proposed in 1867 by J. C. Maxwell to violate the second law of thermodynamics. A variant of the classical MD is the…
Recent studies have developed fundamental limitations on nanoscale thermodynamics, in terms of a set of independent free energy relations. Here we show that free energy relations cannot properly describe quantum coherence in thermodynamic…
While most of the existing quantum information engines assisted by Maxwell's demon harness thermal fluctuations, those that rectify only quantum fluctuations have recently been constructed. We propose an alternative type of quantum…
In 1929, Leo Szilard invented a feedback protocol in which a hypothetical intelligence called Maxwell's demon pumps heat from an isothermal environment and transduces it to work. After an intense controversy that lasted over eighty years;…
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…
We study the efficiency of a single particle Szilard and Carnot engine. Within a first order correction to the quasi-static limit, the work distribution is found to be Gaussian and the correction factor to average work and efficiency only…
We study the quantum mechanical generalization of force or pressure, and then we extend the classical thermodynamic isobaric process to quantum mechanical systems. Based on these efforts, we are able to study the quantum version of…
Nucleic acids theoretically possess a Szilard engine function that can convert the energy associated with the Shannon entropy of molecules for which they have coded recognition, into the useful work of geometric reconfiguration of the…
A 1929 Gedankenexperiment proposed by Szil\'ard, often referred to as "Szil\'ard's engine", has served as a foundation for computing fundamental thermodynamic bounds to information processing. While Szil\'ard's original box could be…
The so-called information-thermodynamics link created by a thought experiment of Szilard became a core of the modern orthodoxy in the field of quantum information and resources theory in quantum thermodynamics. We remind existing objections…
Quantum measurement of a system can change its mean energy, as well as entropy. A selective measurement (classical or quantum) can be used as a "Maxwell's demon" to power a single-temperature heat engine, by decreasing the entropy. Quantum…