2012/03/31 by Michael Bauer, David Abreu, Udo Seifert · 4 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Field-Flow Fractionation Techniques #cond-mat.stat-mech #stochastic dynamics and bifurcation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1751-8113/45/16/162001
published as J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 45 (2012) 162001 · 9 pages, 2 figures
openalex publication_date 2012/04/03 · arxiv created 2012/04/06 · arxiv updated 2012/04/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
A Brownian information machine extracts work from a heat bath through a feedback process that exploits the information acquired in a measurement. For the paradigmatic case of a particle trapped in a harmonic potential, we determine how power and efficiency for two variants of such a machine operating cyclically depend on the cycle time and the precision of the positional measurements. Controlling only the center of the trap leads to a machine that has zero efficiency at maximum power, whereas additional optimal control of the stiffness of the trap leads to an efficiency bounded between 1/2, which holds for maximum power, and 1 reached even for finite cycle time in the limit of perfect measurements.