Experimental verification of Landauer’s principle linking information and thermodynamics

Abstract

In 1961, Rolf Landauer argued that the erasure of information is a dissipative process. A minimal quantity of heat, proportional to the thermal energy and called the Landauer bound, is necessarily produced when a classical bit of information is deleted. A direct consequence of this logically irreversible transformation is that the entropy of the environment increases by a finite amount. Despite its fundamental importance for information theory and computer science, the erasure principle has not been verified experimentally so far, the main obstacle being the difficulty of doing single-particle experiments in the low-dissipation regime. Here we experimentally show the existence of the Landauer bound in a generic model of a one-bit memory. Using a system of a single colloidal particle trapped in a modulated double-well potential, we establish that the mean dissipated heat saturates at the Landauer bound in the limit of long erasure cycles. This result demonstrates the intimate link between information theory and thermodynamics. It further highlights the ultimate physical limit of irreversible computation.

Towards quantum thermodynamics in electronic circuits

“…This process as a whole would then be reversible. The returning leg from the degeneracy point to the original position bears in this case a close relation to the Landauer principle of minimum heat k B T ln 2 generated in the erasure of a bit [35], which was recently demonstrated experimentally using a colloidal particle trapped in a modulated double-well potential [36]. On the other hand, one could move n g quickly back to the original position.…”

Cosmic Background Bose Condensation (CBBC)

“…Also a link between information theory and thermodynamics has been experimentally verified (Bérut et al 2012). Previously, in 2010, an experimental demonstration of information-to-energy conversion was also published (Toyabe et al 2010).…”

Nanoscale thermal imaging of dissipation in quantum systems

“…Here we report a superconducting quantum interference nano-thermometer device with sub 50 nm diameter that resides at the apex of a sharp pipette and provides scanning cryogenic thermal sensing with four orders of magnitude improved thermal sensitivity of below 1 µK/Hz 1/2 . The non-contact non-invasive thermometry allows thermal imaging of very low nanoscale energy dissipation down to the fundamental Landauer limit [16][17][18] of 40 fW for continuous readout of a single qubit at 1 GHz at 4.2 K. These advances enable observation of dissipation due to single electron charging of individual quantum dots in carbon nanotubes and reveal a novel dissipation mechanism due to resonant localized states in hBN encapsulated graphene, opening the door to direct imaging of nanoscale dissipation processes in quantum matter. 2 Investigation of energy dissipation on the nanoscale is of major fundamental interest for a wide range of disciplines from biological processes, through chemical reactions, to energy-efficient computing [1][2][3][4][5] .…”