Information heat engine: converting information to energy by feedback control

Understand

In 1929, Leo Szilard invented a feedback protocol in which a hypothetical intelligence called Maxwell's demon pumps heat from an isothermal environment and transduces it to work.

• After an intense controversy that lasted over eighty years; it was finally clarified that the demon's role does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics, implying that we can convert information to free energy in principle.
• Nevertheless, experimental demonstration of this information-to-energy conversion has been elusive.
• Here, we demonstrate that a nonequilibrium feedback manipulation of a Brownian particle based on information about its location achieves a Szilard-type information-energy conversion.