Experimental investigations of stochastic thermodynamics

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Nearly 150 years ago, Maxwell first asked what happens when a “neat fingered being” – a demon – uses information to extract work from heat. The Second Law of Thermodynamics should forbid this, but how? The question has galled physicists and provoked debate for over a century. One year ago in my laboratory, we made a definitive measurement that confirms a hypothesis proposed 50 years ago: that Maxwell demons need to erase information and that erasing information requires dissipating as much energy as is gained. The work proposed here pursues these ideas to cases where systems are out of equilibrium. One important goal is to be able to measure the form of the function that describes the entropy of a system out of equilibrium. It has been proposed, but never directly tested, that the Shannon entropy plays this role. The function superficially looks like the standard 19