Quantum measurement and the first law of thermodynamics: the energy cost of measurement is the work value of the acquired information

Abstract

The energy cost of measurement is an interesting fundamental question, and may have profound implications for quantum technologies. In the context of Maxwell's demon, it is often stated that measurement has no minimum energy cost, while information has a work value, even though these statements can appear contradictory. However, as we elucidate, these statements do no refer to the cost paid by the measuring device. Here we show that it is only when a measuring device has access to a zero temperature reservoir - that is, never - that the measurement requires no energy. All real measuring devices pay the cost that a heat engine pays to obtain the work value of the information they acquire.

4 pages, revtex4-1. v2: added a reference

References in corpus (5)

• The Physics of Maxwell's demon and information
• Second Law of Thermodynamics with Discrete Quantum Feedback Control
• The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy
• The second law, Maxwell's daemon and work derivable from quantum heat engines
• Relations between Entropies Produced in Nondeterministic Thermodynamic Processes

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• Charging a quantum battery with linear feedback control
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• How an autonomous quantum Maxwell demon can harness correlated information
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• Quantum Thermodynamics and Quantum Coherence Engines
• Detecting Gaussian entanglement via extractable work
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• Measurement-based quantum thermal machines with feedback control
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• Conditional work statistics of quantum measurements
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• Power and Efficiency of a Thermal Engine with a Coherent Bath
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• Thermodynamics of Quantum Measurement and the Demon's Arrow of Time
• Revealing the strokes of autonomous quantum heat engines with work and heat fluctuations
• A thermodynamically consistent approach to the energy costs of quantum measurements
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• Clausius inequality versus quantum coherence
• Bounding the Minimum Time of a Quantum Measurement
• Thermodynamically free quantum measurements
• Daemonic quantum battery charged by thermalization
• Particle in a box with a time-dependent $\delta$-function potential
• Maxwell's demon and the management of ignorance in stochastic thermodynamics
• Universally-Charging Protocols for Quantum Batteries: A No-Go Theorem
• Reversible feedback confinement
• Limits on quantum measurement engines
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• Classical and Quantum Causal Interventions
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• Arising information regularities in an observer
• Thermodynamics of multiple Maxwell demons
• Ergotropic advantage in a measurement-fueled quantum heat engine
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• Enhancing the efficiency of quantum measurement-based engines with entangling measurements
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• Quantum detectors as autonomous machines: assessing the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of information acquisition
• Boosting Work Extraction in Quantum Batteries via Continuous Environment Monitoring
• Quantum thermodynamics under continuous monitoring: a general framework
• The information and its observer: external and internal information processes, information cooperation, and the origin of the observer intellect
• The Quantum Measurement Spintronic Engine: Using Entanglement to Harvest Vacuum Fluctuations
• Entropic costs of extracting classical ticks from a quantum clock