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Single-Photon Atomic Cooling - Raizen Lab - The University of ...

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worked on by Brillouin [27–29], identified the information obtained by the<br />

demon, which it used to determine the appropriate action <strong>of</strong> the trap door,<br />

as having physical entropic content. This concept effectively exorcised such<br />

Maxwell Demons because the entropy associated with the information gathered<br />

by the demon is never less than the reduction <strong>of</strong> entropy due to the demon’s<br />

actions. This notion <strong>of</strong> information carrying entropy has become a key concept<br />

in information theory ever since [30–33]. Despite the fact that the work done<br />

by Szilard and others demonstrated that such processes do not violate any<br />

physical law, any proposal or experiment in this vein has been continued to<br />

be called a Maxwell’s Demon.<br />

<strong>Single</strong>-photon cooling is an optical realization <strong>of</strong> a Maxwell’s Demon.<br />

An atomic ensemble confined in a conservative potential is directly analogous<br />

to the ‘gas in a vessel.’ <strong>The</strong> demon analog, however, is not simply the one-way-<br />

wall alone. Rather, it is the combination <strong>of</strong> the one-way-wall and its carefully<br />

selected slow sweep through the trapped atomic ensemble. <strong>The</strong> information<br />

gathered by the demon is the single photon spontaneously scattered by each<br />

atom as it transits the barrier. To make things a little more concrete, consider<br />

the action <strong>of</strong> the single-photon cooling process on a non-interacting atomic<br />

ensemble with the well defined energy distribution fE defined such that<br />

n(E) = NfE dE (1.4)<br />

where N is the total number <strong>of</strong> atoms, and n(E) is the number <strong>of</strong> atoms with<br />

energy between E and E+dE. Figure 1.7(a) shows such an energy distribution<br />

17

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