Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 15: Statistical Physics far from equilibrium

DY 15.12: Talk

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 12:45–13:00, MA 004

The thermodynamic cost of measurements — •Léo Granger and Holger Kantz — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany

The measurement of thermal fluctuations provides information about the microscopic state of a thermodynamic system and can be used in order to extract work from a single heat bath in a suitable cyclic process. We present a minimal framework for the modeling of a measurement device and we propose a protocol for the measurement of thermal fluctuations. In this framework, the measurement of thermal fluctuations naturally leads to the dissipation of work. We illustrate this framework on a simple two states system inspired by the Szilard's information engine.