
Notes on Landauer’s principle, reversible computation and Maxwell’s demon. The physics of Maxwell’s demon and information. The physics of forgetting: Landauer’s erasure principle and information theory. Maxwell’s Demon 2: Entropy, Classical and Quantum Information, Computing (Taylor and Francis, 2002) Maxwell’s Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing (Taylor and Francis, 1990) The thermodynamics of computation - a review. Dissipation and heat generation in the computing process. Furthermore, it provides new bounds on the heat generation of computations: because conditional entropies can become negative in the quantum case, an observer who is strongly correlated with a system may gain work while erasing it, thereby cooling the environment.īennett, C.

This result gives a direct thermodynamic significance to conditional entropies, originally introduced in information theory. In other words, the more an observer knows about the system, the less it costs to erase it. Our main result is that the work cost of erasure is determined by the entropy of the system, conditioned on the quantum information an observer has about it. Here we show that the standard formulation and implications of Landauer’s principle are no longer valid in the presence of quantum information. However, this consideration assumes that the information about the system to be erased is classical, and does not extend to the general case where an observer may have quantum information about the system to be erased, for instance by means of a quantum memory entangled with the system.

Landauer’s principle states that the erasure of data stored in a system has an inherent work cost and therefore dissipates heat 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In principle, reversible operations may be performed at no energy cost given that irreversible computations can always be decomposed into reversible operations followed by the erasure of data 1, 2, the problem of calculating their energy cost is reduced to the study of erasure. The heat generated by computations is not only an obstacle to circuit miniaturization but also a fundamental aspect of the relationship between information theory and thermodynamics.
