Related papers: When is a bit worth much more than kT ln2?
Is our world just information? We argue that our current notion of information has one serious shortcoming: It is quite literally meaningless. We suggest a meaningful extension of the notion of information that is dynamic, internal,…
In the theory of special relativity, energy can be found in two forms: kinetic energy and rest mass. Potential energy of a body is actually stored under the form of rest mass, interaction energy too, temperature is not. Information acquired…
The erasure of information is fundamentally an irreversible logical operation, carrying profound consequences for the energetics of computation and information processing. We investigate the thermodynamic costs associated with erasing (and…
In 1961, R. Landauer proposed the principle that logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility and further theorized that the erasure of information is fundamentally a dissipative process. Landauer posited that a…
Thermodynamics is a macroscopic physical theory whose two very general laws are independent of any underlying dynamical laws and structures. Nevertheless, its generality enables us to understand a broad spectrum of phenomena in physics,…
We propose one of the very few constructive consequences of the second law of thermodynamics. More specifically, we present protocols for secret-key establishment and multiparty computation the security of which is based fundamentally on…
The meaning and evolution of the notion of "temperature" (which is a key concept for the condensed and gaseous matter theories) are addressed from the different points of view. The concept of temperature turns out to be much more…
Landauer's "principle" claims that erasing one bit of information necessarily dissipates at least Tln2 of heat into the surroundings, making a possibly logically irreversible operation also thermodynamically irreversible. It is commonly…
Measures of temperature that center around human experience get lots of use. Of course thermal physics insights of the last century have shown that reciprocal temperature (1/kT) has applications that temperature addresses less well. In…
It is widely believed that one signal can carry maximum one bit of information, and minimum KTlog2 energy is required to transmit or to erase a bit. Here it is shown four bits of information can be transmitted by one signal in four…
A basic task of information processing is information transfer (flow). Here we study a pair of Brownian particles each coupled to a thermal bath at temperature $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. The information flow in such a system is defined…
We present the minimal energy costs for the measurement and the information erase, using only the Helmholtz free energy and the entanglement of formation. The entanglement of formation appears in the form of difference which indicates the…
In 1961, Rolf Landauer pointed out that resetting a binary memory requires a minimum energy of $k_BT \ln(2)$. However, once written, any memory is doomed to loose its content if no action is taken. To avoid memory losses, a refresh…
A communication theory for a transmitter broadcasting to many receivers is presented. In this case energetic considerations cannot be neglected as in Shannon theory. It is shown that, when energy is assigned to the information bit,…
Erasure of information stored in a quantum state requires energy cost and is inherently an irreversible operation. If quantumness of a system is physical, does erasure of quantum correlation as measured by discord also need some energy…
Landauer's principle states that it costs at least kTln2 of work to reset one bit in the presence of a heat bath at temperature T. The bound of kTln2 is achieved in the unphysical infinite-time limit. Here we ask what is possible if one is…
One of the primary motivations of the research in the field of computation is to optimize the cost of computation. The major ingredient that a computer needs is the energy to run a process, i.e., the thermodynamic cost. The analysis of the…
Despite the wide usage of information as a concept in science, we have yet to develop a clear & concise scientific definition. This paper is aimed at laying the foundations for a new theory concerning the mechanics of information alongside…
Starting from Landauer's slogan "information is physical," we revise and modify Landauer's principle stating that the erasure of information has a minimal price in the form of a certain quantity of free energy. We establish a direct link…
We show that for every qubit of quantum information, there is a well-defined notion of "the amount of energy that carries it", because it is a conserved quantity. This generalizes to larger systems and any conserved quantites: the…