Unified Jarzynski and Sagawa-Ueda relations for Maxwell's demon

Abstract

By using Newtonian mechanics, we construct a general model of Maxwell's demon, a system in which the engine and the memory interact only through the exchange of information. We show that the Jarzynski relation and the two Sagawa-Ueda relations hold simultaneously, and argue that they are the unique triplet which has a natural decomposition property. The uniqueness provides a strong support to the assertion that the mutual information is the key quantity.