Information-to-Work Conversion with Quantum Dots - towards Quantum Coherent Regime

Electrical quantum transport in quantum dots offers a convenient experimental platform for information-to-work conversion studies. At low enough temperatures, it provides access to a single bit of information in form of a single electron either occupying the dot or not. In addition, the energy related to the occupancy is well known thanks to energy quantization, and the work output is obtained in a well defined manner in form of electrical signals. In this talk, we consider the fluctuation-dissipation relation in the information-to-energy conversion. We show experimentally that fluctuations in the work output reduce with increasing work output. At first, this result seems counter-intuitive, but when considering that the ideal work extraction minimizes the dissipative contributions, one finds out that the usual fluctuation-dissipation relation still holds. In the ideal case the work output achieves the full conversion of the information to usable energy, free of fluctuations. In the second part of the talk, I will present our efforts to increase the speed of the charge detection to move from the classical stochastic thermodynamics regime to the quantum regime where the coherences start to play role.