Information Arbitrage in Bipartite Heat Engines

TL;DR

This paper investigates the fundamental connection between heat engines and information engines, revealing that bipartite systems can only produce work by functioning as one or the other, with implications for nanoscale and biological systems.

Contribution

It demonstrates that bipartite heat engines and information engines are mutually exclusive in their ability to produce work, providing new insights into their design principles and constraints.

Findings

Bipartite heat engines act as information engines to produce net work.

Information engines require different fluctuation sources to extract work.

Models include a Brownian-gyrator and a quantum-dot engine, illustrating the concepts.

Abstract

Heat engines and information engines have each historically served as motivating examples for the development of thermodynamics. While these two types of systems are typically thought of as two separate kinds of machines, recent empirical studies of specific systems have hinted at possible connections between the two. Inspired by molecular machines in the cellular environment, which in many cases have separate components in contact with distinct sources of fluctuations, we study bipartite heat engines. We show that a bipartite heat engine can only produce net output work by acting as an information engine. Conversely, information engines can only extract more work than the work consumed to power them if they have access to different sources of fluctuations, i.e., act as heat engines. We illustrate these findings first through an analogy to economics and a cyclically controlled 2D ideal gas. We then explore two analytically tractable model systems in more detail: a Brownian-gyrator heat engine which we show can be reinterpreted as a feedback-cooling information engine, and a quantum-dot information engine which can be reinterpreted as a thermoelectric heat engine. Our results suggest design principles for both heat engines and information engines at the nanoscale, and ultimately imply constraints on how free-energy transduction is carried out in biological molecular machines.