Bosonic statistics enhance Maxwell's demon in photonic experiment
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2602.11276 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 11 Feb 2026] Title:Bosonic statistics enhance Maxwell's demon in photonic experiment Authors:Malaquias Correa Anguita, Sara Marzban, William F. Braasch Jr., Twesh Upadhyaya, Gabriel Landi, Nicole Yunger Halpern, Jelmer J. Renema View a PDF of the paper titled Bosonic statistics enhance Maxwell's demon in photonic experiment, by Malaquias Correa Anguita and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Maxwell's demon elucidates the value of information in thermodynamics, using measurement and feedback: he evolves an equilibrated gas into a nonequilibrium state, from which one might extract work. The demon can evolve the system farther from equilibrium, on average, if the particles obey Bose-Einstein statistics than if they are distinguishable. We experimentally support this decade-and-a-half-old prediction by comparing indistinguishable with distinguishable photons. We use a fully programmable linear-optics platform, whose local photon statistics were shown recently to behave thermally. Our demon nondestructively measures the number of photons in a subset of the modes. Guided by the outcome, he conditionally interchanges the measured and unmeasured modes. This interchange creates a positive temperature difference between a mode in a particular subset and a mode in the other. The temperature difference is greater, on average, if the photons are indistinguishable. This result bolsters a long-standing prediction about the interplay among thermodynamics, information, and quantum particle statistics. Additionally, this work suggests a thermodynamic means of weakly validating boson-sampling platforms. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Optics (physics.optics) Cite as: arXiv:2602.11276 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2602.11276v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.11276 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Malaquias Correa Anguita [view email] [v1] Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:00:05 UTC (852 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Bosonic statistics enhance Maxwell's demon in photonic experiment, by Malaquias Correa Anguita and 5 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-02 Change to browse by: physics physics.optics References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)