Monday, March 5, 2012

1203.0184 (Michael Bauer et al.)

Efficiency of a Brownian information machine    [PDF]

Michael Bauer, David Abreu, Udo Seifert
A Brownian information machine extracts work from a heat bath through a feedback process that exploits the information acquired in a measurement. For the paradigmatic case of a particle trapped in a harmonic potential, we determine how power and efficiency for two variants of such a machine operating cyclically depend on the cycle time and the precision of the positional measurements. Controlling only the center of the trap leads to a machine that has zero efficiency at maximum power whereas additional optimal control of the stiffness of the trap leads to an efficiency bounded between 1/2, which holds for maximum power, and 1 reached even for finite cycle time in the limit of perfect measurements.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0184

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