Autonomous conversion of information to work in quantum dots

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 ...

We report an experimental realisation of Maxwell's demon in a photonic setup. We show that a measurement at the single-photon level followed by a feed-forward operation allows the extraction of work from intense thermal light into an electric circuit. The interpretation of the experiment stimulates the derivation of a new equality relating work extraction to information acquired by measurement. We derive a bound using this relation and show that it is in agreement with the ex...

We consider a feedback control loop rectifying particle transport through a single quantum dot that is coupled to two electronic leads. While monitoring the occupation of the dot, we apply conditional control operations by changing the tunneling rates between the dots and its reservoirs, which can be interpreted as the action of a Maxwell demon opening or closing a shutter. This can generate a current at equilibrium or even against a potential bias, producing electric power f...

The gedanken experiment of Maxwell's demon has led to the studies concerning the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The demon measures fluctuations of a system's observable and converts the information gain into work via feedback control. Recent developments have elucidated the relationship between the acquired information and the entropy production and generalized the second law of thermodynamics and the fluctuation theorems. Here we extend the scope to...

Classical and quantum electronic circuits provide ideal platforms to investigate stochastic thermodynamics and they have served as a stepping stone to realize Maxwell's demons with highly controllable protocols. In this article we first review the central thermal phenomena in quantum nanostructures. Thermometry and basic refrigeration methods will be described as enabling tools for thermodynamics experiments. Next we discuss the role of information in thermodynamics which lea...

According to Landauer's principle, erasure of information is the only part of a computation process that unavoidably involves energy dissipation. If done reversibly, such an erasure generates the minimal heat of $k_BT\ln 2$ per erased bit of information. The goal of this work is to discuss the actual reversal of the optimal erasure which can serve as the basis for the Maxwell's demon operating with ultimate thermodynamic efficiency as dictated by the second law of thermodynam...

A CMOS-based implementation of an autonomous Maxwell's demon was recently proposed (Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 120602) to demonstrate that a Maxwell demon can still work at macroscopic scales, provided that its power supply is scaled appropriately. Here, we first provide a full analytical characterization of the non-autonomous version of that model. We then study system-demon information flows within generic autonomous bipartite setups displaying a macroscopic limit. By doing so, ...

We present an experimental realization of an autonomous Maxwell's Demon, which extracts microscopic information from a System and reduces its entropy by applying feedback. It is based on two capacitively coupled single electron devices, both integrated on the same electronic circuit. This setup allows a detailed analysis of the thermodynamics of both the Demon and the System as well as their mutual information exchange. The operation of the Demon is directly observed as a tem...

We describe a minimal model of a quantum Maxwell demon obeying Hamiltonian dynamics. The model is solved exactly, and we analyze its steady-state behavior. We find that writing information to a quantum memory induces a probability current through the demon, which is the quantum analog of the classical Maxwell demon's action. Our model offers a simple and pedagogical paradigm for investigating the thermodynamics of quantum information processing.

We conduct numerical simulations for an autonomous information engine comprising a set of coupled double quantum dots using a simple model. The steady-state entropy production rate in each component, heat and electron transfer rates are calculated via the probability distribution of the four electronic states from the master transition-rate equations. We define an information-engine efficiency based on the entropy change of the reservoir, implicating power generators that emp...