The minimal work cost of information processing

Abstract

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 devices impedes the development of their performance. Here we determine the minimal work required to carry out any logical process, for instance a computation. It is given by the entropy of the discarded information conditional to the output of the computation. Our formula takes precisely into account the statistically fluctuating work requirement of the logical process. It enables the explicit calculation of practical scenarios, such as computational circuits or quantum measurements. On the conceptual level, our result gives a precise and operational connection between thermodynamic and information entropy, and explains the emergence of the entropy state function in macroscopic thermodynamics.

One-Shot Decoupling

“…An example illustrating this is the quantitative Landauer's principle derived recently in [FDOR12]. The result, which is based on the bound (118), shows that correlations between the inputs and outputs of an irreversible mapping are relevant for the thermodynamic work cost of implementations of the mapping.…”

Quantum Information Processing with Finite Resources

“…The abstract view of finite resource information theory as a resource theory also reveals why it has found various applications in physical resource theories, most prominently in thermodynamics (see, e.g., [30,47,52] and references therein).…”

Resource theory of coherence: Beyond states

“…Recently, quantum resource theories have been formulated in different areas of physics such as the resource theory of athermality in thermodynamics [1][2][3][4][5][6] and the resource theory of asymmetry [7,8]. Furthermore, general structural frameworks of quantum resource theories have been proposed [9].…”