Second Law with Feedback Control

Mikhail A. Noginov

Takahiro Sagawa, Masahito Ueda

A new thermodynamic inequality is derived which leads to the maximum work that can be extracted from multi-heat-baths with the assistance of discrete quantum feedback control. The maximum work is determined by the free-energy difference and a generalized mutual information content between the thermodynamic system and the feedback controller. This maximum work can exceed that in conventional thermodynamics and, in the case of a heat cycle with two heat baths, the heat efficiency can be greater than that of the Carnot cycle. The consistency of our results with the second law of thermodynamics is ensured by the fact that work is needed for information processing of the feedback controller.

Diego Ristè, L. DiCarlo

Shintaro Minagawa, Majid Mohammady, Kenta Sakai +2 more

Adiabatic measurements, followed by feedback and erasure protocols, have often been considered as a model to embody Maxwell’s Demon paradox and to study the interplay between thermodynamics and information processing. Such studies have led to the conclusion, now widely accepted in the community, that Maxwell’s Demon and the second law of thermodynamics can peacefully coexist because any gain provided by the demon must be offset by the cost of performing the measurement and resetting the demon’s memory to its initial state. Statements of this kind are collectively referred to as second laws of information thermodynamics and have recently been extended to include quantum theoretical scenarios. However, previous studies in this direction have made several assumptions, particularly about the feedback process and the demon’s memory readout, and thus arrived at statements that are not universally applicable and whose range of validity is not clear. In this work, we fill this gap by precisely characterizing the full range of quantum feedback control and erasure protocols that are overall consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. This leads us to conclude that the second law of information thermodynamics is indeed universal : it must hold for any quantum feedback control and erasure protocol, regardless of the measurement process involved, as long as the protocol is overall compatible with thermodynamics. Our comprehensive analysis not only encompasses new scenarios but also retrieves previous ones, doing so with fewer assumptions. This simplification contributes to a clearer understanding of the theory.

Kaiyuan Ji, Gilad Gour, Mark M. Wilde

The study of feedback control inspired by Maxwell's demon has yielded fundamental insights into the relationship between thermodynamics and information. However, its fully quantum formulation, where the controller holds quantum side information that cannot be treated as a classical record, remains incomplete. In this paper, we establish fundamental no-go limits for thermodynamic state conversion while allowing quantum side information to be fed back to the system coherently. From two basic operational principles respected by all physically admissible feedback-control schemes, we derive the tightest possible bounds on the single-shot work of formation and extractable work for arbitrary quantum systems conditioned on arbitrary quantum side information. In the asymptotic limit, these bounds yield a generalized second law of thermodynamics with quantum feedback, governed by a conditional free energy. We further show that this generalized second law is consistent with the traditional second law once the acquisition, processing, and reset of side information are accounted for. These results extend information thermodynamics to the fully quantum regime and provide precise thermodynamic meanings for the negativity of single-shot conditional entropies.

Peter Mittelstaedt