Experimental Verification of the Work Fluctuation-Dissipation Relation

We study experimentally work fluctuations in a Szilard engine that extracts work from information encoded as the occupancy of an electron level in a semiconductor quantum dot. We show that as the average work extracted per bit of information increases toward the Landauer limit k(B)T ln 2, the work fluctuations decrease in accordance with the work fluctuation-dissipation relation. We compare the results to a protocol without measurement and feedback and show that when no information is used, the work output and fluctuations vanish simultaneously, contrasting the information-to-energy conversion case where increasing amount of work is produced with decreasing fluctuations. Our study highlights the importance of fluctuations in the design of information-to-work conversion processes.

Automated summary

This study experimentally investigates work fluctuations in a Szilard engine that extracts work from information. The results show that as the average work extracted per bit of information increases, the work fluctuations decrease. Compared to a protocol without measurement and feedback, where no information is used, the work output and fluctuations vanish simultaneously, while in the information-to-energy conversion case, increasing amount of work is produced with decreasing fluctuations.