Minimal Energy Cost for Thermodynamic Information Processing: Measurement and Information Erasure

TL;DR

This paper establishes fundamental thermodynamic lower bounds for information measurement and erasure, revealing conditions where Landauer's principle applies or breaks down, thus advancing the understanding of the thermodynamics of information.

Contribution

It derives new lower bounds for thermodynamic costs of information processing, challenging the universality of Landauer's principle and proposing a second law of information thermodynamics.

Findings

Lower bounds for measurement and erasure energy costs are identified.

Landauer's principle holds only in specific cases, otherwise it breaks down.

The results unify information and thermodynamics in a second law framework.

Abstract

The fundamental lower bounds of the thermodynamic energy cost (work) needed for the measurement and the erasure of information are found. The lower bound for the erasure vindicates the "Landauer's principle" for a special case, but otherwise implies its breakdown, indicating that no unique relationship exists between logical reversibility and physical one. Our results constitute the second law of "information thermodynamics", in which the information content and thermodynamic variables are treated on an equal footing.