Fooling the Landauer bound with a demon biased thermal bath

Abstract

The Landauer principle establishes a fundamental lower bound on the energetic cost of the erasure of a one-bit memory in thermal equilibrium. Here, we experimentally demonstrate how this bound can be effectively circumvented by introducing a hysteresis in the feedback-generated virtual potential of a micro-resonator acting as the information bit. By tuning the hysteresis, we engineer a non-equilibrium steady state with an adjustable effective temperature, enabling erasure processes that consume over 20 percents below the Landauer bound. Our results reveal that the hysteresis acts as an embedded Maxwell demon, exploiting temporal and spatial information to reduce the system's entropy and the thermodynamic transformation cost. This approach provides a versatile platform for exploring the interplay between feedback, information, and energy in stochastic systems.