Refining Landauer's Stack: Balancing Error and Dissipation When Erasing Information

TL;DR

This paper refines Landauer's principle by demonstrating that thermodynamic costs of information erasure under symmetric protocols are higher than previously thought, emphasizing the need for time-asymmetric protocols for efficiency.

Contribution

It shows that the bounds on energy dissipation are tight and diverge in the perfect computation limit, suggesting new directions for thermodynamic computing protocols.

Findings

Thermodynamic costs exceed Landauer's bound under symmetric protocols.

Costs diverge as computation approaches perfection.

Landauer's Stack is experimentally testable.

Abstract

Nonequilibrium information thermodynamics determines the minimum energy dissipation to reliably erase memory under time-symmetric control protocols. We demonstrate that its bounds are tight and so show that the costs overwhelm those implied by Landauer's energy bound on information erasure. Moreover, in the limit of perfect computation, the costs diverge. The conclusion is that time-asymmetric protocols should be developed for efficient, accurate thermodynamic computing. And, that Landauer's Stack -- the full suite of theoretically-predicted thermodynamic costs -- is ready for experimental test and calibration.