https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202226608018
Photonic Maxwell’s Demon: Feed-forward methods for photonic thermodynamic tasks
1 Work done at University of Vienna, Faculty of Physics, Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ), Vienna, Austria
2 Now at Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, ENS-Université PSL, Collège de France, Paris 75005, France.
3 Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina 88040-900, Brazil
4 Christian Doppler Laboratory for Photonic Quantum Computer, Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria
* e-mail: maxime.jacquet@lkb.upmc.fr
Published online: 24 October 2022
Maxwell’s Demon is at the heart of the interrelation between quantum information processing and thermodynamics. In this thought experiment, a demon extracts work from two thermal baths at equilibrium by gaining information about them at the single-particle level and applying classical feed-forward operations. In this talk I will show how to implement a photonic version of Maxwell’s Demon with active feed-forward in a fiber-based system using ultrafast optical switches. This is the first realisation of an active Demon. The experiment [1] shows that, if correlations exist between the two thermal baths, the Demon can extract over an order of magnitude more work than without correlations. This demonstrates the great potential of photonic experiments – which provide a unique degree of control on the system – to access new regimes in quantum thermodynamics.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2022
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
