Speaker
Mr
Mihai-Dorian Vidrighin
(Oxford)
Description
I will present a photonics experiment that can be understood
as an example of Maxwell’s demon. In this experiment we
showed that a measurement at the few-photons level performed
on intense thermal light modes allows, by employing an
operation conditional on measurement outcomes, the creation
of an intensity unbalance, which we used to extract
measurable work into an electric circuit. In order to
interpret the experiment from a thermodynamic stand-point,
we derived an equality relating work extraction to
information acquired by measurement, which is to our
knowledge novel. We obtained a bound on extractable work
using this relation and compared it with experimental
results. Our work puts forward photonics systems as a
platform for experiments related to information in
thermodynamics. In future work we aim to include the effects
of quantum correlations in similar setups.
Primary author
Mr
Mihai-Dorian Vidrighin
(Oxford)
