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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1510.02164,
title = {Photonic Maxwell's demon},
author = {Mihai D. Vidrighin and Oscar Dahlsten and Marco Barbieri and M. S. Kim and Vlatko Vedral and Ian A. Walmsley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.02164},
year = {2016}
}