Related papers: Maxwell's demon and the thermodynamics of computat…

Landauer argued that the process of erasing the information stored in a memory device incurs an energy cost in the form of a minimum amount of mechanical work. We find, however, that this energy cost can be reduced to zero by paying a cost…

Landauer's principle, often regarded as the foundation of the thermodynamics of information processing, holds that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths,…

I dispute the conventional claim that the second law of thermodynamics is saved from a "Maxwell's Demon" by the entropy cost of information erasure, and show that instead it is measurement that incurs the entropy cost. Thus Brillouin, who…

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…

Irreversible information processing cannot be carried out without some inevitable thermodynamical work cost. This fundamental restriction, known as Landauer's principle, is increasingly relevant today, as the energy dissipation of computing…

In thermodynamics one considers thermal systems and the maximization of entropy subject to the conservation of energy. A consequence is Landauer's erasure principle, which states that the erasure of 1 bit of information requires a minimum…

A restricted form of Landauer's Principle, independent of computational considerations, is shown to hold for thermal systems by reference to the joint entropy associated with conjugate observables. It is shown that the source of the…

The fundamental lower bounds of the thermodynamic energy cost (work) needed for the measurement and the erasure of information are found. The lower bound for the erasure vindicates the "Landauer's principle" for a special case, but…

Landauer discussed the minimum energy necessary for computation and stated that erasure of information is accompanied by heat generation to the amount of kT ln2/bit. Modifying the above statement, we claim that erasure of information is…

Information is central to thermodynamics, providing the grounds to the formulation of the theory in powerful abstract statistical terms. One must not forget, however, that, as put by Landauer, {\it information is physical}. This means that…

According to Landauer's principle, erasure of information is the only part of a computation process that unavoidably involves energy dissipation. If done reversibly, such an erasure generates the minimal heat of $k_BT\ln 2$ per erased bit…

The energy cost of measurement is an interesting fundamental question, and may have profound implications for quantum technologies. In the context of Maxwell's demon, it is often stated that measurement has no minimum energy cost, while…

Since reversible computing requires preservation of all information throughout the entire computational process, this implies that all errors that appear as a result of the interaction of the information-carrying system with uncontrolled…

Framing computation as the transformation of metastable memories, we explore its fundamental thermodynamic limits. The true power of information follows from a novel decomposition of nonequilibrium free energy derived here, which provides a…

Landauer erasure seems to provide a powerful link between thermodynamics and information processing (logical computation). The only logical operations that require a generation of heat are logically irreversible ones, with the minimum heat…

Maxwell's demon explores the role of information in physical processes. Employing information about microscopic degrees of freedom, this "intelligent observer" is capable of compensating entropy production (or extracting work), apparently…

We prove that statistical information theoretic quantities, such as information entropy, cannot generally be interrelated with the lower limit of energy dissipation during information erasure. We also point out that, in deterministic and…

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…

We review the physical foundations of Landauer's Principle, which relates the loss of information from a computational process to an increase in thermodynamic entropy. Despite the long history of the Principle, its fundamental rationale and…

As early as 1867, two years after the introduction of the concept of entropy by Clausius, Maxwell showed that the limitations imposed by the second law of thermodynamics depend on the information that one possesses about the state of a…