Thermodynamics of multiple Maxwell demons

TL;DR

This paper explores how multiple Maxwell demons can improve the efficiency of information processing systems, revealing that increasing the number of demons enhances efficiency and alters phase space regions, with implications for biological and assembly line systems.

Contribution

It extends the Mandal-Jarzynski model to multiple demons, analyzing phase space regions and efficiency improvements with increasing demons, including nonidentical demon effects.

Findings

Efficiency increases with the number of demons.

The erasure region expands at the expense of the dud region.

Efficiency saturates at maximum for large demon numbers.

Abstract

In many assembly line processes like metabolic and signaling networks in biological systems, the products of the first enzyme is the reactant for the next enzyme in the network. Working of multiple machines leads to efficient utilization of resources. Motivated by this, we investigate if multiple Maxwell demons lead to more efficient information processing. We study the phase space of multiple demons acting on an information tape based on the model of Mandal and Jarzynski [1, 2]. Their model is analytically solvable and the phase space of the device has three regions: engine, where work is delivered by writing information to the tape, erasure, where work is performed on the device to erase information on the tape, and dud, when work is performed and at the same time the information is written to the tape. For identical demons, we find that the erasure region increases at the expense of the dud region while the information engine region does not change appreciably. The efficiency of the multiple demon device increases with the number of demons in the device and saturates to the equilibrium (maximum) efficiency even at short cycle times for very large number of demons. By investigating a device with nonidentical demons acting on a tape, we identify the demon parameters that control the different regions of the phase space. Our model is well suited to study information processing in assembly line systems.