Related papers: Second Thoughts on the Second Law

The first law of thermodynamics, which governs energy conservation, is traditionally formulated as an equality. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that the first law alone implies a universal Landauer-like inequality linking changes in system…

The laws of thermodynamics, despite their wide range of applicability, are known to break down when systems are correlated with their environments. Here, we generalize thermodynamics to physical scenarios which allow presence of…

Landauer's principle claims that "Information is Physical." It is not surprising that its conceptual antithesis, Wheeler's "It from Bit," has been more popular among computer scientists --- in the form of the Church-Turing hypothesis: All…

It is widely accepted that information erasure entails heat dissipation. Here we analyze asymmetric memory states to show that this energy cost can be shuffled around to any step in a write-erase cycle and need not accompany the logically…

Conventional computing has many sources of heat dissipation, but one of these--the Landauer limit--poses a fundamental lower bound of 1 bit of entropy per bit erased. 'Reversible Computing' avoids this source of dissipation, but is…

While Landauer's Principle sets a lower bound for the work required for a computation, that work is recoverable for efficient computations. However, practical physical computers, such as modern digital computers or biochemical systems, are…

The second law of thermodynamics is discussed and reformulated from a quantum information theoretic perspective for open quantum systems using relative entropy. Specifically, the relative entropy of a quantum state with respect to…

The essential postulates of classical thermodynamics are formulated, from which the second law is deduced as the principle of increase of entropy in irreversible adiabatic processes that take one equilibrium state to another. The entropy…

We show that the no-deleting and no-cloning principles are implications of information conservation principle. This is unlike in classical physics, where cloning and deleting are possible, independently of information conservation.…

Modern digital electronics support remarkably reliable computing, especially given the challenge of controlling nanoscale logical components that interact in fluctuating environments. However, we demonstrate that the high-reliability limit…

The essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose…

Materials that are constantly driven out of thermodynamic equilibrium, such as active and living systems, typically violate the Einstein relation. This may arise from active contributions to particle fluctuations which are unrelated to the…

Almost all processes -- highly correlated, weakly correlated, or correlated not at all---exhibit statistical fluctuations. Often physical laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, address only typical realizations -- as highlighted by…

Systems that are driven by a randomly timed, external protocol can seemingly violate the second law of thermodynamics. We show that this thermodynamic paradox is resolved if the outcome of the random time is stored in a memory device.…

The minimum heat cost of computation is subject to bounds arising from Landauer's principle. Here, I derive bounds on finite modelling -- the production or anticipation of patterns (time-series data) -- by devices that model the pattern in…

Entanglement is central both to the foundations of quantum theory and, as a novel resource, to quantum information science. The theory of entanglement establishes basic laws, such as the non-increase of entanglement under local operations,…

The irreversible entropy increase described by the second law of thermodynamics is fundamentally tied to thermalization and the emergence of equilibrium. In the first part of our work (Ref: arXiv.2503.04152), we constructed an isolated gas…

Recent work using tools from quantum information theory has shown that at the nanoscale where quantum effects become prevalent, there is not one thermodynamical second law but many. Derivations of these laws assume that an experimenter has…

The Turing machine halting problem can be explained by several factors, including arithmetic logic irreversibility and memory erasure, which contribute to computational uncertainty due to information loss during computation. Essentially,…

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…