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The 2nd law of thermodynamics has been revised many times over the past 2 decades. These revisions originated from the fact that, in small systems, thermodynamic quantities fluctuate and the 2nd law can be apparently violated for a short time. These “transient violations” of the 2nd law aren’t really violations. They are instances in which the entropy of a system spontaneously increases, but the 2nd law still holds on average. In this project, you will construct an experimental setup to measure such “transient violations” of the 2nd law in an optical process. The setup comprises a tiny cavity as in the figure above. You will shoot laser light into this cavity, implement a protocol in the laser intensity, and leverage recent theory from our group to formulate the 2nd law of thermodynamics for this process. You will then search for instances in which the 2nd law is temporarily broken, and characterize the statistics of those events. This project will take you to the frontier of nanophotonics, statistical physics, and thermodynamics, in an exciting experiment that promises many surprises.
