A laboratory-testable, solid-state Maxwell demon is proposed that utilizes the electric field energy of an open-gap p-n junction. Numerical results from a commercial semiconductor device simulator (Silvaco International – Atlas) verify primary results from a 1-D analytic model. Present day fabrication techniques appear adequate for laboratory tests of principle.

Disorder, or entropy, in a microscopic quantum system has been measured by an international group of physicists. The team hopes that the feat will shed light on the "arrow of time": the observation that time always marches towards the future. The experiment involved continually flipping the spin of carbon atoms with an oscillating magnetic field and links the emergence of the arrow of time to q...

We introduce four new general optimization algorithms based on thèdemon' algorithm from statistical physics and the simulated annealing (SA) optimization method. These algorithms use a computationally simpler acceptance function, but can use any SA annealing schedule or move generation function. Computation per trial is signiicantly reduced. The algorithms are tested on traveling salesman probl...

We analyze a solitaire game in which a demon rearranges some cards after each move. The graph edge coloring theorems of Kőnig and Vizing follow from the winning strategies developed.