Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics Inspired by Modern Information Theory

A collection of recent papers revisit how to quantify the relationship between information and work in the light of modern information theory, so-called single-shot information theory. This is an introduction to those papers, from the perspective of the author. Many of the results may be viewed as a quantification of how much work a generalized Maxwell’s daemon can extract as a function of its extra information. These expressions do not in general involve the Shannon/von Neumann entropy but rather quantities from single-shot information theory. In a limit of large systems composed of many identical and independent parts the Shannon/von Neumann entropy is recovered.