  Due to their versatility in investigating phenomena in microscopic scales,
optical tweezers have been an excellent platform for studying stochastic
thermodynamics. In this context, this work presents experimental measurements
of the energetic cost of driven finite-time protocols using colloidal Brownian
particles in harmonic potentials. For this simple model system, we compare the
results of optimal and sub-optimal protocols in a time-dependent trap,
controlling the trap stiffness with different modulation amplitudes and
protocol times. We also calculate the Jarzynski relation for the stochastic
trajectories from the experimental data as an independent consistency check.
