The second law of thermodynamics should make that impossible, but how? That question has stymied physicists and provoked debate for a century and a half. The experiments in this thesis confirm a hypothesis proposed by Rolf Landauer over fifty years ago: that Maxwell's demon would need to erase information, and that erasing information-resetting the measuring device to a standard starting state-requires dissipating as much energy as is gained.
For his thesis work, the author used a "feedback trap" to study the motion of colloidal particles in "v
irtual potentials" that may be manipulated arbitrarily. The feedback trap confines a freely diffusing particle in liquid by periodically measuring its position and applying an electric field to move it back to the origin.
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