Multipartite information flow for multiple Maxwell demons

The second law of thermodynamics dictates the fundamental limits to the amount of energy and information that can be exchanged between physical systems. In this work, we extend a thermodynamic formalism describing this flow of energy and information developed for a pair of bipartite systems to many multipartite systems. We identify a natural thermodynamic quantity that describes the information exchanged among these systems. We then introduce and discuss a refined version. Our results are illustrated with a model of two, competing Maxwell demons.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Equivalent definitions of the quantum nonadiabatic entropy production

The nonadiabatic entropy production is a useful tool for the thermodynamic analysis of continuously dissipating, nonequilibrium steady states. For open quantum systems, two seemingly distinct definitions for the nonadiabatic entropy production have appeared in the literature, one based on the quantum relative entropy and the other based on quantum trajectories. We show that these two formulations are equivalent. Furthermore, this equivalence leads us to a proof of the monotonicity of the quantum relative entropy under a special class of completely-positive, trace-preserving quantum maps, which circumvents difficulties associated with the noncommuntative structure of operators.Comment: 13 page

Proof of the Finite-Time Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation for Steady-State Currents

The thermodynamic uncertainty relation offers a universal energetic constraint on the relative magnitude of current fluctuations in nonequilibrium steady states. However, it has only been derived for long observation times. Here, we prove a recently conjectured finite-time thermodynamic uncertainty relation for steady-state current fluctuations. Our proof is based on a quadratic bound to the large deviation rate function for currents in the limit of a large ensemble of many copies.Comment: 3 page

Optimizing non-ergodic feedback engines

Maxwell's demon is a special case of a feedback controlled system, where information gathered by measurement is utilized by driving a system along a thermodynamic process that depends on the measurement outcome. The demon illustrates that with feedback one can design an engine that performs work by extracting energy from a single thermal bath. Besides the fundamental questions posed by the demon - the probabilistic nature of the Second Law, the relationship between entropy and information, etc. - there are other practical problems related to feedback engines. One of those is the design of optimal engines, protocols that extract the maximum amount of energy given some amount of information. A refinement of the second law to feedback systems establishes a bound to the extracted energy, a bound that is met by optimal feedback engines. It is also known that optimal engines are characterized by time reversibility. As a consequence, the optimal protocol given a measurement is the one that, run in reverse, prepares the system in the post-measurement state (preparation prescription). In this paper we review these results and analyze some specific features of the preparation prescription when applied to non-ergodic systems.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, prepared for the 25th Smoluchowski symposium on statistical physics; fixed typo

Information-theoretic bound on the entropy production to maintain a classical nonequilibrium distribution using ancillary control

There are many functional contexts where it is desirable to maintain a mesoscopic system in a nonequilibrium state. However, such control requires an inherent energy dissipation. In this article, we unify and extend a number of works on the minimum energetic cost to maintain a mesoscopic system in a prescribed nonequilibrium distribution using ancillary control. For a variety of control mechanisms, we find that the minimum amount of energy dissipation necessary can be cast as an information-theoretic measure of distinguishability between the target nonequilibrium state and the underlying equilibrium distribution. This work offers quantitative insight into the intuitive idea that more energy is needed to maintain a system farther from equilibrium.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Phase transition in protocols minimizing work fluctuations

For two canonical examples of driven mesoscopic systems - a harmonically-trapped Brownian particle and a quantum dot - we numerically determine the finite-time protocols that optimize the compromise between the standard deviation and the mean of the dissipated work. In the case of the oscillator, we observe a collection of protocols that smoothly trade-off between average work and its fluctuations. However, for the quantum dot, we find that as we shift the weight of our optimization objective from average work to work standard deviation, there is an analog of a first-order phase transition in protocol space: two distinct protocols exchange global optimality with mixed protocols akin to phase coexistence. As a result, the two types of protocols possess qualitatively different properties and remain distinct even in the infinite duration limit: optimal-work-fluctuation protocols never coalesce with the minimal work protocols, which therefore never become quasistatic.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures + SI as ancillary fil

Fundamental Bounds on First Passage Time Fluctuations for Currents

Current is a characteristic feature of nonequilibrium systems. In stochastic systems, these currents exhibit fluctuations constrained by the rate of dissipation in accordance with the recently discovered thermodynamic uncertainty relation. Here, we derive a conjugate uncertainty relationship for the first passage time to accumulate a fixed net current. More generally, we use the tools of large-deviation theory to simply connect current fluctuations and first passage time fluctuations in the limit of long times and large currents. With this connection, previously discovered symmetries and bounds on the large-deviation function for currents are readily transferred to first passage times.Comment: 7 pages including S