Plesch Martin, Dahlsten Oscar, Goold John, Vedral Vlatko
1] Institute of Physics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia [2] Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic [3] Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK.
Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK.
Sci Rep. 2014 Nov 11;4:6995. doi: 10.1038/srep06995.
Maxwell's daemon is a popular personification of a principle connecting information gain and extractable work in thermodynamics. A Szilard Engine is a particular hypothetical realization of Maxwell's daemon, which is able to extract work from a single thermal reservoir by measuring the position of particle(s) within the system. Here we investigate the role of particle statistics in the whole process; namely, how the extractable work changes if instead of classical particles fermions or bosons are used as the working medium. We give a unifying argument for the optimal work in the different cases: the extractable work is determined solely by the information gain of the initial measurement, as measured by the mutual information, regardless of the number and type of particles which constitute the working substance.
麦克斯韦妖是热力学中连接信息获取与可提取功的一个原理的常见拟人化表述。西拉德引擎是麦克斯韦妖的一种特定假设实现方式，它能够通过测量系统内粒子的位置从单一热库中提取功。在此我们研究粒子统计在整个过程中的作用；也就是说，如果使用费米子或玻色子而非经典粒子作为工作介质，可提取的功会如何变化。我们针对不同情况给出了关于最优功的统一论证：可提取的功仅由初始测量的信息获取决定，该信息获取由互信息衡量，而与构成工作物质的粒子数量和类型无关。
