Efficiency of a Brownian information machine

A Brownian information machine extracts work from a heat bath through a feedback process that exploits the information acquired in a measurement. For the paradigmatic case of a particle trapped in a harmonic potential, we determine how power and efficiency for two variants of such a machine operating cyclically depend on the cycle time and the precision of the positional measurements. Controlling only the center of the trap leads to a machine that has zero efficiency at maximum power, whereas additional optimal control of the stiffness of the trap leads to an efficiency bounded between 1/2, which holds for maximum power, and 1 reached even for finite cycle time in the limit of perfect measurements.

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