As systems become smaller, going to almost atomic scales, the quantum effects become more and more present. following this line, the interest in the study of quantum thermodynamics has grown. however, the experimental setups to perform these studies with atoms can be complicated, as they require systems as magneto-optical traps, for example. on the other side, photons are stable, relatively easy to produce and manipulate. the main problem is that photons do not have energetic levels or mass. to overpass this problem, we use an analogy between the paraxial wave equation and the 2d schrodinger equation to implement experimental simulations of quantum systems. in this analogy, a measurement in orbital angular momentum (oam) is related to a projective measurement in energy, allowing us in the proper conditions to study quantum thermodynamics with photonic systems. here we demonstrate how to implement and manipulate thermal states using oam as a degree of freedom. inside the quantum thermodynamics context, we also implemented the first photonic maxwell’s demon with active feed-forward by using ultra-fast optical switches (ufos), where we also studied how thermal baths with correlations could enhance the demon’s power. the last experiment presented here is outside the context of thermodynamics, where we implemented a fiber-based photonic feed-forward protocol with the ufos, allowing us to prepare single-photon states in polarization with high fidelity.