Abstract
We report an experimental realization of Maxwell's demon in a photonic setup. We show that a measurement at the few-photons level followed by a feed-forward operation allows the extraction of work from intense thermal light into an electric circuit. The interpretation of the experiment stimulates the derivation of an equality relating work extraction to information acquired by measurement. We derive a bound using this relation and show that it is in agreement with the experimental results. Our work puts forward photonic systems as a platform for experiments related to information in thermodynamics.
Highlights
Maxwell’s demon made its appearance in 1867 as part of a thought experiment discussing the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics [1]
James Clerk Maxwell imagined the demon as a microscopic intelligent being, able to control a small door in the wall separating two boxes, both enclosing a gas in thermal equilibrium
The demon would use the door to filter particles based on their energy achieving an unbalanced gas distribution, an operation that appeared to be in violation of the second law of thermodynamics, decreasing the entropy of the gas without any investment of work
Summary
Maxwell’s demon made its appearance in 1867 as part of a thought experiment discussing the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics [1]. We show that a measurement at the few-photons level followed by a feed-forward operation allows the extraction of work from intense thermal light into an electric circuit.
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