First-passage information engine

Aubin Archambault, Caroline Crauste-Thibierge, Alberto Imparato, Christopher Jarzynski, Sergio Ciliberto and Ludovic Bellon, submitted to Phy. Rev. Lett.

arXiv: 2407.17414

We investigate the thermodynamic properties of an information engine that uses feedback control to extract work from a manipulated mechanical oscillator. The feedback is triggered by the first passage of the system across a fixed threshold. In this setting, we derive and experimentally verify two distinct fluctuation theorems that involve the information associated with the feedback-controlled stochastic trajectories. Our experimental setup consists of a cantilever submitted to an electrostatic feedback force, and our protocol improves the thermodynamic performances of the engine by a factor of 5, compared with previously proposed protocols.

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