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arXiv:2503.07740 · PRX Quantum

A Friendly Guide to Exorcising Maxwell’s Demon

A. de Oliveira, Jonatan Bohr Brask, Rafael Chaves

Published Jul 14, 2025• 15 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The birth, life, and death of Maxwell’s demon provoked a profound discussion about the interplay between thermodynamics, computation, and information. Even after its resolution, the demon continues to inspire a multidisciplinary field. This tutorial offers a comprehensive overview of Maxwell’s demon and its enduring influence, bridging classical concepts with modern insights in thermodynamics, information theory, and quantum mechanics.

DOI
10.1103/phkv-wrsd

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The birth, life, and death of Maxwell’s demon provoked a profound discussion about the interplay between thermodynamics, computation, and information. Even after its resolution, the demon continues to inspire a multidisciplinary field. This tutorial offers a comprehensive overview of Maxwell’s demon and its enduring influence, bridging classical concepts with modern insights in thermodynamics, information theory, and quantum mechanics.
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 the history of the demon and a variety of interesting consequences of the second law of thermodynamics are presented, mainly in quantum mechanics, but also in the theory of gravity. Also highlighted are some of the recent work that explores the role of information, illuminated by Maxwell's demon, in the arena of quantum-information theory.
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 required the insight that an intimate relationship exists between information and thermodynamics. Here, we realize a Maxwell demon experiment that tracks the state of each constituent in both the classical and quantum regimes. The demon is a microwave cavity that encodes quantum information about a superconducting qubit and converts information into work by powering up a propagating microwave pulse by stimulated emission. Thanks to the high level of control of superconducting circuits, we directly measure the extracted work and quantify the entropy remaining in the demon's memory. This experiment provides an enlightening illustration of the interplay of thermodynamics with quantum information.