Work and information processing in a solvable model of Maxwell's demon.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Mandal D
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3406850 | biostudies-other | 2012 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Publications
Work and information processing in a solvable model of Maxwell's demon.
Mandal Dibyendu D Jarzynski Christopher C
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20120702 29
We describe a minimal model of an autonomous Maxwell demon, a device that delivers work by rectifying thermal fluctuations while simultaneously writing information to a memory register. We solve exactly for the steady-state behavior of our model, and we construct its phase diagram. We find that our device can also act as a "Landauer eraser", using externally supplied work to remove information from the memory register. By exposing an explicit, transparent mechanism of operation, our model offers ...[more]
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