Spontaneous fluctuation-symmetry breaking and the Landauer principle

TL;DR

This paper links the Landauer principle to fluctuation symmetry breaking, showing that the energetic cost of erasing information arises from spontaneous symmetry breaking in fluctuation relations, supported by simulations on a 2D Ising model.

Contribution

It reveals that the Landauer bound emerges from fluctuation symmetry breaking, providing a new theoretical perspective on the thermodynamics of information erasure.

Findings

Landauer bound arises from fluctuation symmetry breaking.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking explains the energetic cost of erasure.

Numerical simulations support the theoretical insight.

Abstract

We study the problem of the energetic cost of information erasure by looking at it through the lens of the Jarzynski equality. We observe that the Landauer bound, $\langle W \rangle \geq kT \ln 2$, on average dissipated work $\langle W \rangle$ associated to an erasure process, literally emerges from the underlying second law bound as formulated by Kelvin, $\langle W \rangle \geq 0$, as consequence of a spontaneous breaking of the Crooks-Tasaki fluctuation-symmetry, that accompanies logical irreversibility. We illustrate and corroborate this insight with numerical simulations of the process of information erasure performed on a 2D Ising ferromagnet.