Photonic Maxwell’s Demon

2015/10/07 by Mihai D. Vidrighin, Oscar Dahlsten, Marco Barbieri +3 · 188 citations
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Mathematics #Maxwell's demon #Maxwell's equations #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Photon #Photonics #Physics #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Realization (probability) #Work (physics) #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.116.050401

published in Physical Review Letters 116(5), 050401 (American Physical Society) · 8 pages, 3 figures

arxiv created 2015/10/07 · openalex publication_date 2016/02/01 · arxiv updated 2016/02/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

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.

Citations

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• The thermodynamics of computation—a review
• Experimental verification of Landauer’s principle linking information and thermodynamics
• The local approach to quantum transport may violate the second law of thermodynamics
• Two-Photon Imaging with Thermal Light
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