Maxwell’s Demon Meets Quantum Dots

While there is an increase in the total entropy — per the second law of thermodynamics — that increase doesn’t occur in the demon-y quantum dot by itself. As one of the collaborators, Massimiliano Esposito (University of Luxembourg) told Phys.org: “It does, of course, respect thermodynamics…. However, if the part of the system implementing the demon is disregarded, everything looks as if the remaining pat of the system was subjected to a Maxwell demon breaking the second law while keeping the first one intact.”