N-States Continuous Maxwell Demon

Abstract

Maxwell’s demon is a famous thought experiment and a paradigm of the thermodynamics of information. It is related to Szilard’s engine, a two-state information-to-work conversion device in which the demon performs single measurements and extracts work depending on the state measurement outcome. A variant of these models, the continuous Maxwell demon (CMD), was recently introduced by Ribezzi-Crivellari and Ritort where work was extracted after multiple repeated measurements every time that τ is in a two-state system. The CMD was able to extract unbounded amounts of work at the cost of an unbounded amount of information storage. In this work, we built a generalization of the CMD to the N-state case. We obtained generalized analytical expressions for the average work extracted and the information content. We show that the second law inequality for information-to-work conversion is fulfilled. We illustrate the results for N-states with uniform transition rates and for the N = 3 case.