Numerical simulations on Szilard's engine and information erasure

We present a computational model for Szilard's engine and the information discarding process. Taking advantage of a fact that the one is essentially the reversed cycle of the other, we can discuss the both by employing the same model. Through numerical simulations we calculate the work extracted by the engine and the heat generation in the information discarding process. It is found that these quantities depend on some realistic ingredients, which means that the work done by the engine is no longer canceled by the heat generation in the information erasure.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Growing length and time scales in a suspension of athermal particles

We simulate a relaxation process of non-brownian particles in a sheared viscous medium; the small shear strain is initially applied to a system, which then undergoes relaxation. The relaxation time and the correlation length are estimated as functions of density, which algebraically diverge at the jamming density. This implies that the relaxation time can be scaled by the correlation length using the dynamic critical exponent, which is estimated as 4.6(2). It is also found that shear stress undergoes power-law decay at the jamming density, which is reminiscent of critical slowing down