The European INFERNOS (Information, fluctuations, and energy control in small systems) project aims to realize experimentally Maxwell’s Demon* by developing electronic and biomolecular nanodevices that support this principle.
Project partners met earlier this week at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona. The project is centered on considering information as a thermodynamic parameter.
Its ideas may be applied to different fields of knowledge, like biology
or computer science. For instance, DNA replication, a basic biological
process, can be described as the action of small thermodynamic devices
that are able to copy information.
Marco Ribezzi, researcher from the Department of Fundamental Physics,
explains that “the principal novelty of INFERNOS is to bring a robust
and rigorous experimental base for this field of knowledge.
“We aim at creating a device that can use information to
supply/extract energy to/from a system”. In this sense, the UB group, in
which researcher Fèlix Ritort from the former department also
participates, focuses their activity on understanding how information
and temperature changes are used in individual molecules manipulation...
More: INFERNOS project: Maxwell’s Demon in nanoscale systems
