Colloquium: The physics of Maxwell's demon and information

By K. Maruyama, Franco Nori, Vlatko Vedral. 2007

539 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Maxwell's demon was born in 1867 and still thrives in modern physics. He plays important roles in clarifying the connections between two theories: thermodynamics and information. Here, we present the history of the demon and a variety of interesting consequences of the second law of thermodynamics, mainly in quantum mechanics, but also in the theory of gravity. We also highlight some of the recent work that explores the role of information, illuminated by Maxwell's demon, in the arena of quantum information theory.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f037ef2d91bc02e340b09997bf7dea829cf89bda

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Citations in the corpus

Description of quantum coherence in thermodynamic processes requires constraints beyond free energy (2014, background): “One might think that the work relations extend without alteration, but this is not the case— quantum coherences cannot be simply converted into ordered energy, and so the standard Szila´rd result must be modiﬁed.”
Quantum Thermodynamics: A Dynamical Viewpoint (2013, methodology): “An example is the case of Maxwell’s demon, which has been resolved by Szilard [105–108].”
Experimental verification of Landauer’s principle linking information and thermodynamics (2012, background): “The idea of a connection between information and thermodynamics can be traced back to Maxwell’s ‘demon’ 6–8 .”
Thermodynamics of quantum systems under dynamical control (2015, methodology): “If information gathered by observations is commuted into work by a “demon”, this work must obey the Szilard-Landauer (SL) bound (Caves, 1990; Del Rio et al., 2011; Jacobs, 2012; Landauer, 1961; Maruyama et al., 2009; Moore and Scully, 1986; Scully, 2001; Toyabe et al., 2010): It must not exceed the ”
The resource theory of informational nonequilibrium in thermodynamics (2013, background): “Indeed, there is now a large literature on the role of information theory in thermodynamics, centered around such topics as Maxwell’s demon (Maruyama et al., 2009), Szilard’s engine (Szilard, 1929), the thermodynamic reversibility of computation and Landauer’s principle (Bennett, 1973, 1982;…”
Stochastic thermodynamics, fluctuation theorems and molecular machines (2012, methodology): “The situation becomes apparently different if information about the state of the system during this process becomes available through a measurement as the classical example of Maxwell’s demon and the Szilard engine reviewed in [278, 279] demonstrate.”
Quantum Technologies Need a Quantum Energy Initiative (2021, unknown): “The cost of measurement and information erasure spent in steps (i) and (iv) have been shown to define the fundamental cost of information processing [14], solving the Maxwell demon paradox [15, 16].”
Structural complexity of minerals: information storage and processing in the mineral world (2013, methodology): “The information-to-energy conversion had been a topic of numerous theoretical and experimental studies (Maruyama et al., 2009; Toyabe et al., 2010; Bérut et al., 2012).”
Colloquium: Quantum fluctuation relations: Foundations and applications (2010, background): “The principle of microreversibility is introduced and discussed in quantum mechanics textbooks for autonomous (i.e., non-driven) quantum systems (Messiah, 1962).”
Quantum Simulation (2013, background): “Another direction of interest is quantum heat engines, quantum Brownian motion (Hänggi and Marchesoni, 2009; Hänggi et al., 2005) and quantum thermodynamics (Maruyama et al., 2009).”
The classical-quantum boundary for correlations: Discord and related measures (2011, methodology): “An information-theoretic approach to taming Maxwell’s demon has far-reaching implications in different branches of physics such as general relativity and quantum mechanics (Maruyama et al., 2009).”
Quantum and Information Thermodynamics: A Unifying Framework based on Repeated Interactions (2016, background): “In the traditional thought-experiment of Maxwell, the demon shuffles gas particles from a cold to a hot reservoir with negligible consumption of energy [18,19].”
Thermodynamics with Continuous Information Flow (2014, methodology): “Harnessing this information flow to do useful tasks is vital in a variety of disciplines: Engineers exploit information through feedback to control a system’s dynamical evolution [1,2], biological organisms need to sense their environment in order to adapt [3], and physicists have been fascinated by”