Infima statistics of entropy production in an underdamped Brownian motor.

Abstract

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy never decreases for isolated macroscopical systems, which defines the arrow of time. For small systems, although the entropy increases on average, due to strong fluctuation, it may encounter a temporary decrease. The probability of negative entropy production follows the fluctuation theorem. Recently, it has been demonstrated theoretically the infima law that there exists a lower bound for the average values of the minima of the negative entropy production, which is -k_{B}. In this paper, we have constructed a horizontal Brownian motor immersed in a granular gas, whose dynamics is governed by the underdamped stochastic process. By recording the angular motion of the motor and measuring the key parameters of the system, we experimentally demonstrate that, despite the nonideal elements in the experiments and that the complex underlying dynamics, the average value of the minima of the negative entropy production is still bounded by -k_{B}, which may invoke further theoretical investigations of the applicability of the infima law in nonideal realistic small systems.