Abstract
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, information is physical. This means that the processing of information will be unavoidably linked to the costs of manipulating the real physical systems carrying the information. Here we will focus on the particular process of erasing information, which plays a fundamental role in the description of heat engines. We will review Landauer’s principle and the associated erasure energy cost. We will also show, following the recent contributions from Vaccaro and Barnett, that cost of erasing does not need to be paid with energy, but with any other conserved quantity. Finally, we will address the issue of designing heat engines based on these new concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
Maxwell states in his book [1]: “This is only one of the instances in which conclusions which we have drawn from our experience of bodies consisting of an immense number of molecules may be found not to be applicable to the more delicate observations and experiments which we may suppose made by one who can perceive and handle the individual molecules.”
- 2.
In practical terms, the fact that the probability \(p_1\) reduces exponentially with E, means the work process may be halted at a finite value of the gap for a correspondingly small probability of error.
- 3.
We use subscripted labels M and R to distinguish quantities associated with the memory and reservoir, respectively, when confusion might otherwise arise.
- 4.
For brevity, we ignore irrelevant phase factors when writing down states of the memory and reservoir.
- 5.
The fixed point condition is not satisfied exactly, however, it can be approached with small error, in principle.
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Acknowledgements
J.A.V. thanks the Australian Research Council (LP140100797) and the Lockheed Martin Corporation for financial support. S.M.B. thanks the Royal Society for support (RP150122).
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Croucher, T., Wright, J., Carvalho, A.R.R., Barnett, S.M., Vaccaro, J.A. (2018). Information Erasure. In: Binder, F., Correa, L., Gogolin, C., Anders, J., Adesso, G. (eds) Thermodynamics in the Quantum Regime. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol 195. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99046-0_29
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