Energy Requirement of Control: Comments on Szilard's Engine and Maxwell's Demon

Abstract

In mathematical physical analyses of Szilard's engine and Maxwell's demon, a general assumption (explicit or implicit) is that one can neglect the energy needed for relocating the piston in Szilard's engine and for driving the trap door in Maxwell's demon. If this basic assumption is wrong, then the conclusions of a vast literature on the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and of Landauer's erasure theorem are incorrect too. Our analyses of the fundamental information physical aspects of various type of control within Szilard's engine and Maxwell's demon indicate that the entropy production due to the necessary generation of information yield much greater energy dissipation than the energy Szilard's engine is able to produce even if all sources of dissipation in the rest of these demons (due to measurement, decision, memory, etc) are neglected.

New, simpler and more fundamental approach utilizing the physical meaning of control-information and the related entropy production. Criticism of recent experiments added

References in corpus (5)

• Information heat engine: converting information to energy by feedback control
• Quantum Szilard Engine
• Quantum Maxwell's Demon in Thermodynamic Cycles
• Thermal noise driven computing
• Thermal noise engines

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• Identifying Functional Thermodynamics in Autonomous Maxwellian Ratchets
• Errors and their mitigation at the Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise secure key exchange
• Correlation-powered Information Engines and the Thermodynamics of Self-Correction
• The Gibbs paradox, the Landauer principle and the irreversibility associated with tilted observers
• Thermodynamics of stochastic Turing machines
• Stochastic Efficiency: Five Case Studies
• Does Information Have Mass?
• Functional Thermodynamics of Maxwellian Ratchets: Constructing and Deconstructing Patterns, Randomizing and Derandomizing Behaviors
• Optimized finite-time information machine
• Work extraction from single-mode thermal noise by measurements: How important is information?
• Three types of Landauer's erasure principle: a microscopic view
• Zero and negative energy dissipation at information-theoretic erasure
• Response to "Comment on 'Zero and negative energy dissipation at information-theoretic erasure'"
• Comments on "sub-KBT micro-electromechanical irreversible logic gate"
• Driven particle in a one dimensional periodic potential with feedback control: efficiency and power optimization
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