The Physics of Maxwell's demon and information

Abstract

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 the arena of quantum information theory.

24 pages, 13 figures. v2: some refs added, figs improved

References in corpus (7)

• Superconducting Circuits and Quantum Information
• Quantum Thermodynamic Cycles and quantum heat engines
• On the quantum, classical and total amount of correlations in a quantum state
• Dissipation: The phase-space perspective
• The second law, Maxwell's daemon and work derivable from quantum heat engines
• Quantum Heat Engine With Multi-Level Quantum Systems
• Quantum-Classical Transition of Photon-Carnot Engine Induced by Quantum Decoherence

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Artificial Brownian motors: Controlling transport on the nanoscale
• Quantum Thermodynamic Cycles and quantum heat engines
• The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy
• Quantum Szilard Engine
• Quantum Thermodynamic Cycles and Quantum Heat Engines (II)
• Extracting work from a single heat bath through feedback
• Information erasure without an energy cost
• Steering Bose-Einstein condensates despite time symmetry
• Equivalence condition for the canonical and microcanonical ensembles in coupled spin systems
• Does Probability become Fuzzy in Small Regions of Spacetime?