Generalized continuous Maxwell demons

Garrahan, Juan P.; Ritort, Felix

Abstract

We introduce a family of generalized continuous Maxwell demons (GCMDs) operating on idealized single-bit equilibrium devices that combine the single-measurement Szilard and the repeated measurements of the continuous Maxwell demon protocols. We derive the cycle distributions for extracted work, information content, and time and compute the power and information-to-work efficiency fluctuations for the different models. We show that the efficiency at maximum power is maximal for an opportunistic protocol of continuous type in the dynamical regime dominated by rare events. We also extend the analysis to finite-time work extracting protocols by mapping them to a three-state GCMD. We show that dynamical finite-time correlations in this model increase the information-to-work conversion efficiency, underlining the role of temporal correlations in optimizing information-to-energy conversion. The effect of finite-time work extraction and demon memory resetting is also analyzed. We conclude that GCMD models are thermodynamically more efficient than the single-measurement Szilard and preferred for describing biological processes in an information-redundant world.

Citation

Garrahan, J. P., & Ritort, F. (2023). Generalized continuous Maxwell demons. Physical Review E, 107(3), Article 034101. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.107.034101

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 16, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Mar 2, 2023
• Publication Date: Mar 2, 2023
• Deposit Date: May 3, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: May 3, 2023
• Journal: Physical Review E
• Print ISSN: 1539-3755
• Electronic ISSN: 2470-0053
• Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 107
• Issue: 3
• Article Number: 034101
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.107.034101
• Keywords: Fluctuation theorems; Fluctuations & noise; Nonequilibrium statistical mechanics; Efficiency at maximum power; Information theory; Stochastic analysis methods
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/18517721
• Publisher URL: https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.107.034101