Speaker
John Bechhoefer
(Simon Fraser University)
Description
We report experiments that test aspects of the interplay
among thermodynamics, information theory, and control. Our
goal is to explore the issues raised historically by
Maxwell, Szilard, Landauer, Bennett, which have found
renewed interest after the development of stochastic
thermodynamics. Our setup consists of a time-dependent,
“virtual” double-well potential created by a feedback loop
that is much faster than the relaxation time of the
particle. Focusing on tests of Landauer’s principle of
erasure, we extend Landauer's original scenario to cases
where less than a full bit of information is erased. We
show experimentally that the appropriate thermodynamic
definition of a nonequilibrium system connected to a heat
bath is given by the Gibbs-Shannon entropy function,
evaluated over nonequilibrium probabilities. We also
present preliminary results showing how our setup can be
modified to model a combined system for work extraction and
measurement.