Photonic Maxwell’s Demon

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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.

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�ber die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingriffen intelligenter Wesen

L SZILARD (1929)

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Experimental demonstration of information-to-energy conversion and validation of the generalized Jarzynski equality

Shoichi Toyabe, Takahiro Sagawa, Masahito Ueda … (2010)

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Resource theory of quantum states out of thermal equilibrium.

Fernando G S L Brandão, Michał Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim … (2013)

The ideas of thermodynamics have proved fruitful in the setting of quantum information theory, in particular the notion that when the allowed transformations of a system are restricted, certain states of the system become useful resources with which one can prepare previously inaccessible states. The theory of entanglement is perhaps the best-known and most well-understood resource theory in this sense. Here, we return to the basic questions of thermodynamics using the formalism of resource theories developed in quantum information theory and show that the free energy of thermodynamics emerges naturally from the resource theory of energy-preserving transformations. Specifically, the free energy quantifies the amount of useful work which can be extracted from asymptotically many copies of a quantum system when using only reversible energy-preserving transformations and a thermal bath at fixed temperature. The free energy also quantifies the rate at which resource states can be reversibly interconverted asymptotically, provided that a sublinear amount of coherent superposition over energy levels is available, a situation analogous to the sublinear amount of classical communication required for entanglement dilution.