Quantum-mechanical Maxwell’s demon

Abstract

A Maxwell’s demon is a device that gets information and trades it in for thermodynamic advantage, in apparent (but not actual) contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. Quantum-mechanical versions of Maxwell’s demon exhibit features that classical versions do not: in particular, a device that gets information about a quantum system disturbs it in the process. This paper proposes experimentally realizable models of quantum Maxwell’s demons, explicates their thermodynamics, and shows how the information produced by quantum measurement and by decoherence acts as a source of thermodynamic inefficiency.