Overview
- Nominated as an outstanding Ph.D. thesis by Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
- Demonstrates experimentally that Maxwell's Demon does not violate the second law of thermodynamics
- Shows how a "feedback trap" can be adapted to study the thermodynamics of small systems
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Springer Theses (Springer Theses)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This thesis reveals how the feedback trap technique, developed to trap small objects for biophysical measurement, could be adapted for the quantitative study of the thermodynamic properties of small systems. The experiments in this thesis are related to Maxwell’s demon, a hypothetical intelligent, “neat fingered” being that uses information to extract work from heat, apparently creating a perpetual-motion machine.
The second law of thermodynamics should make that impossible, but how? That question has stymied physicists and provoked debate for a century and a half. The experiments in this thesis confirm a hypothesis proposed by Rolf Landauer over fifty years ago: that Maxwell’s demon would need to erase information, and that erasing information—resetting the measuring device to a standard starting state—requires dissipating as much energy as is gained.
For his thesis work, the author used a “feedback trap” to study the motion of colloidal particles in “v
irtual potentials” that may be manipulated arbitrarily. The feedback trap confines a freely diffusing particle in liquid by periodically measuring its position and applying an electric field to move it back to the origin.Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr. Momčilo Gavrilov grew up in Belgrade, Serbia, where he also received his bachelor degree in physics from Belgrade University in 2010. He completed his PhD in physics under supervision of Prof. John Bechhoefer at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada in 2016. Dr. Gavrilov is currently a biophysics postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Taekjip Ha lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, United States. He is using nanopore methods to explore the helicase activity of motor proteins and understand how biological systems process information.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Experiments on the Thermodynamics of Information Processing
Authors: Momčilo Gavrilov
Series Title: Springer Theses
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63694-8
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-63693-1Published: 10 August 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87616-0Published: 11 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-63694-8Published: 01 August 2017
Series ISSN: 2190-5053
Series E-ISSN: 2190-5061
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 147
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 53 illustrations in colour
Topics: Thermodynamics, Measurement Science and Instrumentation, History and Philosophical Foundations of Physics