Maxwell’s Demon, Szilard Engine and Landauer Principle

Abstract

The second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic in nature. Its formulation requires that the state of a system be described by a probability distribution. A natural question, thereby, arises as to whether a prior knowledge about the state of the system affects the second law. This question has now been nurtured for over a century, and it was incepted by C Maxwell through his famous thought experiment wherein comes the idea of Maxwell’s demon. The next important step in this direction was provided by L Szilard, who demonstrated a theoretical model for an information engine incorporating Maxwell’s demon. The final step that led to the inter-linkage of information theory and thermodynamics was through Landauer’s principle of information erasure that established the fact that information is physical. Here, we will present an overview of these three major works that laid the foundations of information thermodynamics.