Extracting work from a single heat bath through feedback

Abstract

Work can be extracted from a single heat bath if additional information is available. For the paradigmatic case of a Brownian particle in a harmonic potential, whose position has been measured with finite precision, we determine the optimal protocol for manipulating the center and stiffness of the potential in order to maximize this work in a finite-time process. The bound on this work imposed by a generalized second law inequality involving information can be reached only if both position and stiffness of the potential are controlled and the process is quasistatic. Estimates on the power delivered by such an "information machine" operating cyclically follow from our analytical results.

6 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (19)

• Work and information processing in a solvable model of Maxwell's demon
• Thermodynamics of a physical model implementing a Maxwell demon
• Second-law-like inequalities with information and their interpretations
• Coherence-enhanced efficiency of feedback-driven quantum engines
• Stochastic thermodynamics with information reservoirs
• Finite-time erasing of information stored in fermionic bits
• Efficiency of a Brownian information machine
• Stochastic Thermodynamics of Learning
• General achievable bound of extractable work under feedback control
• Extracting work from a single heat bath - A case study on Brownian particle under external magnetic field in presence of information
• Thermodynamics of collisional models for Brownian particles: General properties and efficiency
• Thermodynamics of Information Processing Based on Enzyme Kinetics: an Exactly Solvable Model of Information Pump
• Open Problems on Information and Feedback Controlled Systems
• Extracting work optimally with imprecise measurements
• Optimized finite-time information machine
• Extracting work from the magnetic field coupled Brownian particles
• Driven particle in a one dimensional periodic potential with feedback control: efficiency and power optimization
• Thermodynamics of multiple Maxwell demons
• Autonomous Brownian motor driven by nonadiabatic variation of internal parameters