Experimental verification of the work fluctuation-dissipation relation for information-to-work conversion

TL;DR

This paper experimentally verifies the work fluctuation-dissipation relation in a quantum dot Szilard engine, demonstrating how work fluctuations decrease as the average work approaches the Landauer limit, emphasizing the role of fluctuations in information-to-work conversion.

Contribution

The study provides experimental evidence linking work fluctuations to average work in an information engine, highlighting the fluctuation-dissipation relation in quantum systems.

Findings

Work fluctuations decrease as average work approaches the Landauer limit.

No information protocol results in vanishing work and fluctuations.

Fluctuations are crucial in designing information-to-work conversion processes.

Abstract

We study experimentally work fluctuations in a Szilard engine that extracts work from information encoded as the occupancy of an electron level in a semiconductor quantum dot. We show that as the average work extracted per bit of information increases towards the Landauer limit $k_BT \ln 2$, the work fluctuations decrease in accordance with the work fluctuation-dissipation relation. We compare the results to a protocol without measurement and feedback and show that when no information is used, the work output and fluctuations vanish simultaneously contrasting the information-to-energy conversion case where increasing amount of work is produced with decreasing fluctuations. Our work highlights the importance of fluctuations in the design of information-to-work conversion processes.