Generalized Continuous Maxwell Demons

We introduce a family of Generalized Continuous Maxwell Demons (GCMDs) operating on idealized single-bit equilibrium devices that combine the single-measurement Szilard and the Continuous Maxwell Demon protocols. We derive the cycle-distributions for extracted work, information-content and time, and compute the power and information-to-work efficiency fluctuations for the different models. We show that the efficiency at maximum power is maximal for an opportunistic protocol of continuous-type in the dynamical regime dominated by rare events. We also extend the analysis to finite-time work extracting protocols by mapping them to a three-state GCMD. We show that dynamical finite-time correlations in this model increase the information-to-work conversion efficiency, underlining the role of temporal correlations in optimizing information-to-energy conversion.