Maxwell's Demon and Biotechnology: Some Devilish Ways to Separate the Living from the Dead

Abstract

Ratchet phenomena occur in venues as distinct as interacting quantum systems to the device that tightens our tennis net. At the microscopic level Maxwell suggested that ratchets seemed to violate the 2nd “Law” of thermodynamics and invoked the specter of Maxwell's Demon, an imaginary agent who let molecules through a gate depending on their speed, fast to the right of the gate, slow to the left. Another form of the Demon could simply open a gate when a particle approached and therefore concentrate particles on one side without doing work. While a Maxwell Demon cannot in fact concentrate objects without doing work, we can do the inverse action: we can make a opening which is asymmetric to the right and to the left side of two partitions. Under certain conditions in fact one can use asymmetry to concentrate objects, and there are large uses for this in Biotechnology. In this talk, the speaker will present some examples of demons his research group have made.