Three types of Landauer's erasure principle : a microscopic view
Oriols, Xavier (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Enginyeria Electrònica)
Nikolić, Hrvoje (Rudjer Bošković Institute. Theoretical Physics Division)

Date:	2023
Abstract:	An important step to incorporate information in the second law of thermodynamics was done by Landauer, showing that the erasure of information implies an increase in heat. Most attempts to justify Landauer's erasure principle are based on thermodynamic argumentations. Here, using just the time-reversibility of classical microscopic laws, we identify three types of the Landauer's erasure principle depending on the relation between the two final environments: the one linked to a logical input 1 and the other to logical input 0. The strong type (which is the original Landauer's formulation) requires the final environments to be in thermal equilibrium. The intermediate type giving the entropy change of kln 2 occurs when the two final environments are identical macroscopic states. Finally, the weak Landauer's principle, providing information erasure with no entropy change, when the two final environments are macroscopically different. Even though the above results are formally valid for classical erasure gates, a discussion on their natural extension to quantum scenarios is presented. This paper strongly suggests that the original Landauer's principle (based on the assumption of thermalized environments) is fully reasonable for microelectronics, but it becomes less reasonable for future few-atoms devices working at THz frequencies. Thus, the weak and intermediate Landauer's principles, where the erasure of information is not necessarily linked to heat dissipation, are worth investigating.
Grants:	Agencia Estatal de Investigación RTI2018-097876-B-C21 Agencia Estatal de Investigación PID2021-127840NB-I00 Generalitat de Catalunya 001-P-001644 European Commission 881603 European Commission 765426
Note:	Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Published in:	European Physical Journal Plus, Vol. 138, Issue 3 (March 2023) , art. 250, ISSN 2190-5444

DOI: 10.1140/epjp/s13360-023-03855-z

20 p, 1.2 MB

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