INFERNOS project: Maxwellʼs Demon in nanoscale systems

Logo of the European project INFERNOS (Information, fluctuations, and energy control in small systems).
Logo of the European project INFERNOS (Information, fluctuations, and energy control in small systems).
Research
(07/10/2013)
 
Maxwell's Demon is an imaginary creature that the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell created in 1897. The creature could turn heat into work without causing any other change, which violates the second law of thermodynamics. The primary goal of the European project INFERNOS (Information, fluctuations, and energy control in small systems) is to realize experimentally Maxwellʼs Demon; in other words, to develop the electronic and biomolecular nanodevices that support this principle.
Logo of the European project INFERNOS (Information, fluctuations, and energy control in small systems).
Logo of the European project INFERNOS (Information, fluctuations, and energy control in small systems).
Research
07/10/2013
 
Maxwell's Demon is an imaginary creature that the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell created in 1897. The creature could turn heat into work without causing any other change, which violates the second law of thermodynamics. The primary goal of the European project INFERNOS (Information, fluctuations, and energy control in small systems) is to realize experimentally Maxwellʼs Demon; in other words, to develop the electronic and biomolecular nanodevices that support this principle.
 
Project partners next meet on 7 and 8 October at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona. The project is centred on considering information as a thermodynamic parameter. Its ideas may be applied to different fields of knowledge, like biology or computer science. For instance, DNA replication, a basic biological process, can be described as the action of small thermodynamic devices which are able to copy information.

Although Maxwellʼs Demon is one of the cornerstones of theoretical statistical mechanisms, little has been done about its definite experimental realization. Marco Ribezzi, researcher from the Department of Fundamental Physics, explains that “the principal novelty of INFERNOS is to bring a robust and rigorous experimental base for this field of knowledge. We aim at creating a device that can use information to supply/extract energy to/from a system”. In this sense, the UB group, in which researcher Fèlix Ritort from the former department also participates, focuses their activity on understanding how information and temperature changes are used in individual molecules manipulation.

From the theory side, researchers will work in order to develop a theory of the fluctuation processes in small systems, which would then facilitate efficient algorithms for the Maxwellʼs Demon operation.

INFERNOS is a three-year European project of the programme Future and Emerging Technologies (FET). Besides the University of Barcelona, INFERNOS partners are: Aalto University (Finland), project coordinator, Lund University (Sweden), the University of Oslo (Norway), Delf University of Technology (Netherlands), the National Center for Scientific Research (France) and the Research Foundation of State University of New York.