Information ratchets exploiting spatially structured information reservoirs

Abstract

Information ratchets extract work from heat baths using low entropy information reservoirs. We find that the structure of the reservoirs affects both their performance and phase diagram. By deriving exact probabilities of recurrence in d-dimensional reservoirs we calculate the net extraction of work. Performance is characterised by two critical dimensions (i) For d < 3 driven exploration of the reservoir is essential to extract work (ii) For d > 4 purely diffusive exploration is optimal. This has important consequences for computation where sequential operations constitute a 1D path.