Heat engines and information engines have each historically served as motivating examples for the development of thermodynamics. While these two types of systems are typically thought of as two separate kinds of machines, recent empirical studies of specific systems have hinted at possible connections between the two. Inspired by molecular machines in the cellular environment, which in many cases have separate components in contact with distinct sources of fluctuations, we study bipartite heat engines. We show that a bipartite heat engine can produce net output work only by acting as an information engine. Conversely, information engines can extract more work than the work consumed to power them only if they have access to different sources of fluctuations, i.e., act as heat engines. We illustrate these findings first through an analogy to economics and a cyclically controlled 2D ideal gas. We then explore two analytically tractable model systems in more detail: a Brownian-gyrator heat engine, which we show can be reinterpreted as a feedback-cooling information engine, and a quantum-dot information engine, which can be reinterpreted as a thermoelectric heat engine. Our results suggest design principles for both heat engines and information engines at the nanoscale and ultimately imply constraints on how free-energy transduction is carried out in biological molecular machines.

中文翻译：

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二分式热机中的信息套利


热发动机和信息发动机在历史上都是热力学发展的激励性例子。虽然这两种类型的系统通常被认为是两种不同的机器，但最近对特定系统的实证研究表明了两者之间可能存在的联系。受细胞环境中分子机器的启发，在许多情况下，分子机器具有与不同波动源接触的独立组件，我们研究了二分热机。我们表明，二分热引擎只能通过充当信息引擎来产生净输出功。相反，只有当信息引擎能够接触到不同的波动源（即充当热机）时，它们才能提取比为其提供动力所消耗的功更多的功。我们首先通过与经济学和循环控制的二维理想气体的类比来说明这些发现。然后，我们更详细地探讨了两个分析上可处理的模型系统：布朗回转热机，我们展示了它可以重新解释为反馈冷却信息引擎，以及量子点信息引擎，它可以重新解释为热电热机。我们的结果提出了纳米级热发动机和信息引擎的设计原则，并最终暗示了在生物分子机器中如何进行自由能转导的限制。