Ludovic Bellon

The microcantilever oscillates at 1270 Hz, and its position controls a virtual potential: an invisible energy landscape with two wells, created by feedback. Normally, switching between the wells occurs when the system crosses the zero point, but now a delay comes into play: the threshold is shifted by an amount h.

A driver is traveling at night in fog. The headlights pick out only the nearest meter of road, and a map marking every turn is useless because there are no landmarks to see. That is roughly how Maxwell's demon feels in a noisy world: it tries to extract work from thermal motion, but its knowledge of particle trajectories drowns in interference.