Maxwell’s demon is a tiny but fine‐fingered being, capable to extract work from a system at instantaneous equilibrium, without needing energy input or information erasure. In the 20’th century many workers have claimed that the demon cannot operate. Here the point of view is taken that this exorcism of the demon never applied, since one did not consider Maxwell’s original invention. For a Brownian particle coupled to a quantum bath it was shown by us that quantum entanglement can allow extraction of work from a non‐equilibrium system coupled to a single bath. And mesoscopic work sources may establish work extraction cycles even when they are coupled to equilibrium mesoscopic systems immersed in a macroscopic thermal bath. Quantum entanglement and mesocopicity are now identified with (true) Maxwell demons.
Maxwell’s demon is a tiny but fine‐fingered being, capable to extract work from a system at instantaneous equilibrium, without needing energy input or information erasure. In the 20’th century many workers have claimed that the demon cannot operate. Here the point of view is taken that this exorcism of the demon never applied, since one did not consider Maxwell’s original invention. For a Brownian particle coupled to a quantum bath it was shown by us that quantum entanglement can allow extraction of work from a non‐equilibrium system coupled to a single bath. And mesoscopic work sources may establish work extraction cycles even when they are coupled to equilibrium mesoscopic systems immersed in a macroscopic thermal bath. Quantum entanglement and mesocopicity are now identified with (true) Maxwell demons.
The information of a quantum system acquired by a Maxwell demon can be used for either work extraction or entanglement preparation. We study these two tasks by using a thermal qubit, in which a demon obtains her information from measurements on the environment of the qubit. The allowed entanglement, between the qubit and an auxiliary system, is enhanced by the information. And, the increment is find to be equivalent to the extractable work. The Maxwell demon is called to be quantum by Beyer \textit{et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett 123, 250606 (2019) ] if there is quantum steering from the environment to the qubit. In this case, the postmeasured states of the qubit, after the measurements on its environment, cannot be simulated by an objective local statistical ensemble. We present a upper bound of extractable work, and equivalently of the allowed entanglement, for unsteerable demons, considering two measurements inducing two orthogonal changes of the Bloch vector of the qubit.
We propose and analyze Maxwell's demon based on a single qubit with avoided level crossing. Its operation cycle consists of adiabatic drive to the point of minimum energy separation, measurement of the qubit state, and conditional feedback. We show that the heat extracted from the bath at temperature T can ideally approach the Landauer limit of kBTln2 per cycle even in the quantum regime. Practical demon efficiency is limited by the interplay of Landau-Zener transitions and coupling to the bath. We suggest that an experimental demonstration of the demon is fully feasible using one of the standard superconducting qubits.
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 performed by a demon, whose memory is erased at some nonzero energy cost. Here we propose a new type of quantum Maxwell's demon engine where work is directly extracted from the measurement channel, such that no heat bath is required. We show that in the Zeno regime of frequent measurements, memory erasure costs eventually vanish. Our findings provide a new paradigm to analyze quantum heat engines and work extraction in the quantum world.
With a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems undergoing, respectively, quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths at different stages of a cycle, we are able to clarify some important aspects of the second law of thermodynamics. The quantum heat engines also offer a practical way, as an alternative to Szilard's engine, to physically realize Maxwell's demon. While respecting the second law on the average, they are also capable of extracting more work from the heat baths than is otherwise possible in thermal equilibrium.
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.
Maxwell’s Demon conspires to use information about the state of a confined molecule in a Szilard engine (randomly frozen into a state subspace by his own actions) to derive work from a single-temperature heat bath. It is widely accepted that, if the Demon can achieve this at all, he can do so without violating the Second Law only because of a counterbalancing price that must be paid to erase information when the Demon’s memory is reset at the end of his operating cycle. In this paper, Maxwell’s Demon is analyzed within a “referential” approach to physical information that defines and quantifies the Demon’s information via correlations between the joint physical state of the confined molecule and that of the Demon’s memory. On this view, which received early emphasis in Fahn’s 1996 classical analysis of Maxwell’s Demon, information is erased not during the memory reset step of the Demon’s cycle, but rather during the expansion step, when these correlations are destroyed. Dissipation and work extraction are analyzed here for a Demon that operates a generalized quantum mechanical Szilard engine embedded in a globally closed composite, which also includes a work reservoir, a heat bath and the remainder of the Demon’s environment. Memory-engine correlations lost during the expansion step, which enable extraction of work from the Demon via operations conditioned on the memory contents, are shown to be dissipative when this decorrelation is achieved unconditionally so no work can be extracted. Fahn’s essential conclusions are upheld in generalized form, and his quantitative results supported via appropriate specialization to the Demon of his classical analysis, all without external appeal to classical thermodynamics, the Second Law, phase space conservation arguments or Landauer’s Principle.