Maxwell's Daemon: information versus particle statistics.
Maxwell's daemon is a popular personification of a principle connecting information gain and extractable work in thermodynamics. A Szilard Engine is a particular hypothetical realization of Maxwell's daemon, which is able to extract work from a single thermal reservoir by measuring the position of particle(s) within the system. Here we investigate the role of particle statistics in the whole process; namely, how the extractable work changes if instead of classical particles fermions or bosons are used as the working medium. We give a unifying argument for the optimal work in the different cases: the extractable work is determined solely by the information gain of the initial measurement, as measured by the mutual information, regardless of the number and type of particles which constitute the working substance.
1] Institute of Physics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia [2] Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic [3] Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK.
Martin
M
Plesch
Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK.
Oscar
O
Dahlsten
1] Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK [2] The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 34014 Trieste, Italy.
John
J
Goold
1] Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK [2] Center for Quantum Technology, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Vlatko
V
Vedral