Speaker
Andrea Hofmann
(IST Austria)
Description
Thermodynamics provides a powerful description of energy flow in macroscopic systems. We study its validity upon reducing the number of particles comprising the system down to a single electron. We perform work on an electron residing in a quantum dot coupled to a reservoir and extract the heat it produces when equilibrating with the reservoir. Due to the small system size, the values for heat and work measured in single repetitions of the same experiment fluctuate strongly. These nonequilibrium fluctuations serve to measure an equilibrium quantity, the free energy, demonstrating that information is encoded in an ensemble of random fluctuations.
Author
Andrea Hofmann
(IST Austria)