Condensed Matter Seminar: Active matter information engines

The relationship between information and thermodynamics remains a fundamental thought-provoking issue since the days of Maxwell. The most effective platforms to explore this relation are information machines: processes that convert measured information about a system to extractable work.  A crucial question beyond the currently explored regime in the field is how information machines perform out of equilibrium, namely when not in equilibrium with a thermal bath. This is the general scenario of relevance to biological systems and is the focus of this presentation.  In this talk, I will discuss several experimental realizations of information engines operating on driven and active systems with different geometries and compare their operation to equivalent engines working on equilibrated systems.