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Updated: Mar 25, 2026

Quantum State Engineering of Light with Continuous-wave Optical Parametric Oscillators
Published on: May 30, 2014
Photonic Maxwell's Demon
Mihai D Vidrighin1,2, Oscar Dahlsten2,3, Marco Barbieri2,4
1QOLS, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London SW7 2BW, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
We report an experimental realization of Maxwell's demon in a photonic setup. We show that a measurement at the few-photons 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 an 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.
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