On-chip Maxwell's demon as an information-powered refrigerator

TL;DR

This paper reports an experimental realization of an autonomous Maxwell's Demon using coupled single-electron devices, demonstrating entropy reduction and mutual information exchange through temperature changes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel on-chip Maxwell's Demon setup that enables detailed thermodynamic analysis of information-driven refrigeration.

Findings

Temperature drop in the System indicating entropy reduction

Temperature rise in the Demon due to information processing

Direct observation of Demon operation through temperature changes

Abstract

We present an experimental realization of an autonomous Maxwell's Demon, which extracts microscopic information from a System and reduces its entropy by applying feedback. It is based on two capacitively coupled single electron devices, both integrated on the same electronic circuit. This setup allows a detailed analysis of the thermodynamics of both the Demon and the System as well as their mutual information exchange. The operation of the Demon is directly observed as a temperature drop in the System. We also observe a simultaneous temperature rise in the Demon arising from the thermodynamic cost of generating the mutual information.