CQuIC Seminars
Landauer's principle, fluctuations and the second law
Presented by Ben Schumacher, Kenyon College
Maxwell's demon cannot achieve a violation of the Second Law
of thermodynamics because of the thermodynamic cost of
information erasure (known as Landauer's principle). This
suggests a new statement of the Second Law, one that is provably
equivalent to more familiar versions: No process can have as its sole
result the erasure of information. The connection between information
and thermodynamics is made even stronger by some recent theorems
in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. The Jarzynski identity,
which governs the amount of work done in a non-equilibrium process,
can be generalized in a natural way to encompass processes that either
acquire or dispose of information. Numerical experiments confirm this
new information identity.
3:00 pm, Friday, August 9, 2013
PAIS-2540, PAIS
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