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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 11: Focus Session: Single Particle Sources for Electronic Devices II
(Joint session of HL and TT organized by HL)

TT 11.4: Talk

Monday, March 7, 2016, 16:00–16:15, H10

Maxwell's demon in the quantum regime — •Gernot Schaller — TU Berlin, Institut für Theoretische Physik

Feedback control can be a useful tool to change the Full Counting Statistics of charges being transferred through a microscopic device. It can be used to suppress fluctuations of the current or to revert its direction e.g., against a potential gradient. The latter case is particularly interesting from a thermodynamic perspective. For an implicit modeling of the controller, this leads to an apparent violation of the second law that may be interpreted as a modification due to a Maxwell-type demon. In contrast, when the control becomes autonomous, i.e., when the controller is included in the thermodynamic description, these apparent paradoxes can be nicely resolved. I will illustrate this viewpoint for electronic transport through quantum dots. Interestingly, these concepts from stochastic thermodynamics can be generalized to true quantum systems, where the evolution of degenerate populations and coherences in the system energy eigenbasis is coupled.