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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2025
The Maxwell demon and the Szilard engine demonstrate that work can be extracted from a heat bath through measurement and feedback in apparent violation of the second law. A systematic analysis shows that, by including the measurement process and the subsequent erasure of a memory according to Landauer’s principle, the second law is indeed restored. For such feedback-driven processes, the Sagawa–Ueda relation provides a generalization of the Jarzynski relation. For the general class of bipartite systems, the concepts from stochastic thermodynamics are developed. This framework applies to systems where one component “learns” about the changing state of the other one, as in simple models for bacterial sensing. The chapter closes with a simple information machine that shows how the ordered sequence of bits in a tape can be used to transform heat into mechanical work. Likewise, mechanical work can be used to erase information, i.e., randomize such a tape. These processes are shown to obey a second law of information processing.
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