Oberlin College and Conservatory

Physics & Astronomy Department Lecture Series: Benjamin Schumacher, Kenyon College

Thursday, December 4, 2014 at 4:35pm to 5:45pm

Wright Lecture Hall, W201
110 North Professor Street, Oberlin, OH 44074

"Landauer's Principle, Fluctuations and the Second Law" is the title of the talk to be presented by Professor Benjamin Schumacher, Kenyon College.

Abstract:  Maxwell's demon cannot achieve a violation of the Second Law of thermodynamics because of the thermodynamic cost of information erasure (known as Landauer's principle).  This suggests a new statement of the Second Law, one that is provably equivalent to more familiar versions:  No process can have as its sole result the erasure of information.  The connection between information and thermodynamics is made even stronger by some recent theorems in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.  The amazing Jarzynski identity, which governs the amount of work done in a non-equilibrium process, can be generalized in a natural way to encompass processes that either acquire or dispose of information.  Numerical experiments confirm this new information identity.

A reception for Professor Schumacher begins at 4:10 p.m. in the Anderson Lounge, Wright Lab, second floor.

Event Type

Info Sessions/Presentations/Webinars

Departments

Academic, Physics and Astronomy

Contact Person

Diane Doman

Contact Phone Number

440-775-5205

Contact E-mail Address

Diane.Doman@oberlin.edu

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