A Maxwell demon that can work at macroscopic scales

Abstract

Maxwell's demons work by rectifying thermal fluctuations. They are not expected to function at macroscopic scales where fluctuations become negligible and dynamics become deterministic. We propose an electronic implementation of an autonomous Maxwell's demon that indeed stops working in the regular macroscopic limit as the dynamics becomes deterministic. However, we find that if the power supplied to the demon is scaled up appropriately, the deterministic limit is avoided and the demon continues to work. The price to pay is a decreasing thermodynamic efficiency. Our work suggests that novel strategies may be found in nonequilibrium settings to bring to the macroscale non-trivial effects so far only observed at microscopic scales.