Maximum work extraction and implementation costs for nonequilibrium Maxwell's demons

Henrik Sandberg, Jean-Charles Delvenne, Nigel J. Newton, and Sanjoy K. Mitter
Phys. Rev. E 90, 042119 – Published 13 October 2014

Abstract

We determine the maximum amount of work extractable in finite time by a demon performing continuous measurements on a quadratic Hamiltonian system subjected to thermal fluctuations, in terms of the information extracted from the system. The maximum work demon is found to apply a high-gain continuous feedback involving a Kalman-Bucy estimate of the system state and operates in nonequilibrium. A simple and concrete electrical implementation of the feedback protocol is proposed, which allows for analytic expressions of the flows of energy, entropy, and information inside the demon. This let us show that any implementation of the demon must necessarily include an external power source, which we prove both from classical thermodynamics arguments and from a version of Landauer's memory erasure argument extended to nonequilibrium linear systems.

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  • Received 17 January 2014
  • Revised 23 July 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.90.042119

©2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Henrik Sandberg1,*, Jean-Charles Delvenne2, Nigel J. Newton3, and Sanjoy K. Mitter4

  • 1Department of Automatic Control, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2ICTEAM and CORE, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
  • 3School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom
  • 4Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

  • *Corresponding author: hsan@kth.se

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Vol. 90, Iss. 4 — October 2014

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