Information flows in macroscopic Maxwell's demons

Abstract

A CMOS-based implementation of an autonomous Maxwell's demon was recently proposed (Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 120602) to demonstrate that a Maxwell demon can still work at macroscopic scales, provided that its power supply is scaled appropriately. Here, we first provide a full analytical characterization of the non-autonomous version of that model. We then study system-demon information flows within generic autonomous bipartite setups displaying a macroscopic limit. By doing so, we can study the thermodynamic efficiency of both the measurement and the feedback process performed by the demon. We find that the information flow is an intensive quantity and that, as a consequence, any Maxwell's demon is bound to stop working above a finite scale if all parameters but the scale are fixed. However, this can be prevented by appropriately scaling the thermodynamic forces. These general results are applied to the autonomous CMOS-based demon.

minor corrections. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2204.09466

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• Thermodynamic Constraints in Dynamic Random-Access Memory Cells: Experimental Verification of Energy Efficiency Limits in Information Erasure
• Coulomb-mediated single-electron heat transfer statistics across capacitively coupled silicon nanodots
• Synchronization of thermodynamically consistent stochastic phase oscillators