A Maxwell demon that can work at macroscopic scales

TL;DR

This paper presents an electronic Maxwell's demon that can operate at macroscopic scales by scaling power input, challenging the expectation that such demons only function at microscopic levels, and explores the thermodynamic trade-offs involved.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable electronic implementation of a Maxwell's demon that remains functional at macroscopic scales by adjusting power input, revealing new nonequilibrium strategies.

Findings

The demon stops working at the regular macroscopic limit without power scaling.

Scaling power input allows the demon to continue functioning at larger scales.

Thermodynamic efficiency decreases as the power is scaled up.

Abstract

Maxwell's demons work by rectifying thermal fluctuations. They are not expected to function at macroscopic scales where fluctuations become negligible and dynamics become deterministic. We propose an electronic implementation of an autonomous Maxwell's demon that indeed stops working in the regular macroscopic limit as the dynamics becomes deterministic. However, we find that if the power supplied to the demon is scaled up appropriately, the deterministic limit is avoided and the demon continues to work. The price to pay is a decreasing thermodynamic efficiency. Our work suggests that novel strategies may be found in nonequilibrium settings to bring to the macroscale non-trivial effects so far only observed at microscopic scales.