Full statistics of erasure processes: Isothermal adiabatic theory and a statistical Landauer principle

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework for analyzing the full statistics of energy transfer in slow, quantum erasure processes, extending Landauer's principle to include fluctuation effects and providing insights into energetic costs and bounds.

Contribution

It introduces an isothermal adiabatic theorem for quantum systems, extending Landauer's principle to the full statistical level of energy transfer fluctuations.

Findings

Full statistics of energy transfers can be controlled in quasi-static quantum processes.

Fluctuations can break traditional Landauer bounds.

The approach provides a deeper understanding of energetic costs in quantum information erasure.

Abstract

We study driven finite quantum systems in contact with a thermal reservoir in the regime in which the system changes slowly in comparison to the equilibration time. The associated isothermal adiabatic theorem allows us to control the full statistics of energy transfers in quasi-static processes. Within this approach, we extend Landauer's Principle on the energetic cost of erasure processes to the level of the full statistics and elucidate the nature of the fluctuations breaking Landauer's bound.