Experimental verification of the work fluctuation-dissipation relation for information-to-work conversion
Abstract
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 towards the Landauer limit kBT 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 work highlights the importance of fluctuations in the design of information-to-work conversion processes.