Differential Landauer's principle

TL;DR

This paper introduces a differential version of Landauer's principle, linking the rate of entropy production to the rate of information erasure, and analyzes the physical process of recording and erasing information.

Contribution

It derives a new differential form of Landauer's principle connecting entropy production rate with information erasure rate.

Findings

Recording information requires driving the memory out of equilibrium.

The differential Landauer's principle relates entropy production rate to information erasure rate.

Provides a detailed analysis of the physical process of information recording and erasure.

Abstract

Landauer's principle states that the erasure of information must be a dissipative process. In this paper, we carefully analyze the recording and erasure of information on a physical memory. On the one hand, we show that in order to record some information, the memory has to be driven out of equilibrium. On the other hand, we derive a differential version of Landauer's principle: We link the rate at which entropy is produced at every time of the erasure process to the rate at which information is erased.