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arXiv · 1510.02164

Photonic Maxwell's demon

Mihai D. Vidrighin·Oscar Dahlsten·Marco Barbieri·M. S. Kim·Vlatko Vedral·Ian A. Walmsley
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Abstract

We report an experimental realisation of Maxwell's demon in a photonic setup. We show that a measurement at the single-photon 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 a new 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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Mihai D. Vidrighin, Oscar Dahlsten, Marco Barbieri, M. S. Kim, Vlatko Vedral, Ian A. Walmsley. 2015-10-07. Photonic Maxwell's demon. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.116.050401

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