Photonic Maxwell's demon

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an experimental realization of Maxwell's demon using photonic systems, showing how measurement and feed-forward enable work extraction from thermal light, and introduces a new theoretical equality relating work and information.

Contribution

It presents the first experimental implementation of Maxwell's demon in a photonic setup and derives a new equality linking work extraction to measurement information.

Findings

Work can be extracted from thermal light via measurement and feed-forward.

A new equality relating work and information was derived and experimentally validated.

Photonic systems are viable platforms for thermodynamics and information experiments.

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.