FQXi's latest round of grants generously sponsored by our partners at the Templeton World Charity Foundation , will focus attention on the use of information as fuel. We are giving out a total of 8 million dollars to fund seven projects bringing together work in fundamental physics, information theory and philosophy. Information underlies a lot of modern ideas in physics, connecting the microstates to macrostates of thermal physics for example. As such we are proud to support work on how such an understanding can be leveraged as a source of energy. Many of these proposals are based on realizations of Maxwell's demons (entities that can use information about microstates) and their refinement into Szilard engines which make decisions based on this information to extract useful work.
The projects will work in areas such as
1.) How can microscopic fluctuations be exploited to provide a source of useful work?
2.) Can practically accessible information be used in thermal controls?
3.) Using the optomechanics of carbon nanotubes to encode useful information about the quantum state of a system
4.) How information can be used as a quantum clock, and what the thermodynamic constraints on the accuracy of such a clock will be
5.) What makes thermodynamics special in the quantum regime?
6.) What are the practical limits on the conversion of information to work?
7.) Can we build a fully autonomous Maxwell's demon?
We're excited to see the new science that comes out of the projects. Congratulations to the winners. We'd like to thank everyone who applied for the hard work that they put into producing an impressive range of proposals. As usual there was a larger number of very exciting proposals than we can afford to fund.