Hawking evaporation and the Landauer Principle

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Hawking black-hole evaporation saturates the Landauer Principle, indicating maximal efficiency in information loss, and extends the analysis to fractal horizons with Barrow entropy, linking thermodynamics and information theory.

Contribution

It is the first work to identify Hawking evaporation and the Landauer Principle as manifestations of the same process, including extensions to fractal horizons.

Findings

Hawking evaporation saturates the Landauer Principle

Information loss in black holes is maximally efficient

Extension to Barrow entropy links fractal horizons with thermodynamics

Abstract

We show that Hawking black-hole evaporation saturates the Landauer Principle of information thermodynamics. Our result implies that information loss experienced by a black hole during Hawking evaporation takes place as efficiently as possible. We also extend the analysis to the case of Barrow entropy as a phenomenological realization of a fractal event horizon, where the Landauer Principle informs amongst different options for the black hole temperature. To our knowledge, this work is the first identification of the two results as expressions of the same process.