Maxwell&rsquo / s thought experiment on a demon performing microscopic actions and violating the
second law of thermodynamics has been a challenging paradox for a long time. It is finally
resolved in the seventies and eighties by using Landauer&rsquo / s principle, which state that erasing
information is necessarily accompanied with a heat dumped to the environment. The purpose
of this study is to describe the heat dumped to the environment associated with erasure operations
on quantum systems. To achieve this, first a brief introduction to necessary tools like
density matrix formalism, quantum operators and entropy are given. Second, the Maxwell&rsquo / s
demon and Szilard model is described. Also the connection between information theory and
physics is discussed via this model. Finally, heat transfer operators associated with quantum
erasure operations are defined and all of their properties are obtained.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/2/12611047/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 September 2009 |
| Creators | Aksak, Cagan |
| Contributors | Turgut, Sadi |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for METU campus |
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