Simulation of a refrigerator run by the Maxwell's demon
Second law of thermodynamics does not allow the transfer of energy from a heat source at a lower temperature to another at a higher temperature without doing work. "Maxwell's demon" is a hypothetical being which seems to go around the restrictions of the second law, if one ignores the information contained in the decisions of the demon.
Indeed, it is important to understand the interrelation of entropy and information to understand why the second law cannot be circumvented by the demon.
Mandal, Quan and Jarzynski have proposed a refrigerator (Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 030602 (2013)), which pumps heat from a lower to higher temperature, without any work input - but in the process modifying a series of (low entropy) binary bits of information so that they are more random (and hence have greater entropy).
The aim of this project is to carry out analytical and computer studies of model(s) of this type, and verify their findings.
The student is expected to