Lecture on "Extracting useful work from information and beyond: Maxwell’s demon and recent developments" in the framework of the PhD course "Energetics in the quantum regime"

  • Dipartimento di Fisica - Aula 606
  • Seminar

Speakers

Matteo Acciai
SISSA

Details

Abstract

In this lecture, I will introduce devices that seemingly violate the second law of thermodynamics. Starting from the well-known
Maxwell’s demon and Szilard’s engine, I will briefly discuss how introducing information in the picture makes it possible to
have a consistent thermodynamic description of such systems and present recent experimental implementations in quantum devices.
In the second part of the lecture, I will discuss recent research results, discussing a bipartite electronic system “powered”
by a nonthermal resource and able to produce a useful output at vanishing heat extraction from the resource (thus resembling a
Maxwell’s demon). Considering first a noninteracting configuration, I will discuss how fluctuations from the resource part
bound the maximum available output production. Then, I will move to an quantum-dot-based configuration, discussing the role of
information transfer between resource and working substance.

Bio

Matteo Acciai is a researcher in theoretical condensed matter physics at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA)
in Trieste, Italy. He graduated from the University of Genova, where he also obtained the PhD, in joint supervision with the
Aix-Marseille University, France, in 2019. Before joining SISSA as junior faculty researcher in 2024, he moved to Sweden in 2020
for a postdoctoral fellowship at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.
His research interests are in the fields of mesoscopic quantum transport and thermodynamics and, more recently, cold-atom platforms
for simulating many-body systems.

This lecture is organized thank to the financial support of the project
PRIN 2022 - 2022XK5CPX (PE3) SoS-QuBa - "Solid State Quantum Batteries: Characterization and Optimization"
funded within the programme "PNRR Missione 4 - Componente 2 - Investimento 1.1 Fondo per il Programma Nazionale
di Ricerca e Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN)", funded by the European Union - Next Generation EU.