Nonequilibrium information erasure below kTln2

TL;DR

This paper generalizes Landauer's principle to nonequilibrium states, showing that information erasure can be achieved with zero heat dissipation by exploiting initial energy and entropy, supported by simulations of nanosphere memory.

Contribution

It introduces a nonequilibrium erasure bound and protocols that enable dissipation-free information reset away from equilibrium.

Findings

Nonequilibrium bounds on work and heat can be reduced to zero.

Reset protocols can harness initial energy and entropy for dissipation-free erasure.

Numerical simulations support the feasibility of dissipation-free reset in nanosphere memory.

Abstract

Landauer's principle states that information erasure requires heat dissipation. Landauer's original result focused on equilibrium memories. We here investigate the reset of information stored in a nonequilibrium state of a symmetric two-state memory. We derive a nonequilibrium generalization of the erasure principle and demonstrate that the corresponding bounds on work and heat may be reduced to zero. We further introduce reset protocols that harness the initial preparation energy and entropy and so allow to reach these nonequilibrium bounds. We finally provide numerical simulations with realistic parameters of an optically levitated nanosphere memory that support these findings. Our results indicate that local dissipation-free information reset is possible away from equilibrium.